atesmen, namely, that
they habitually evade all arguments based on natural right, and defend
every legal wrong on the ground that it works well in practice, is the
precise characteristic of our habitual view of woman. The perplexity
must be resolved somehow. We seldom meet a legislator who pretends to
deny that strict adherence to our own principles would place both sexes
in precisely equal positions before law and constitution, as well as in
school and society. But each has his special quibble to apply, showing
that in this case we must abandon all the general maxims to which we
have pledged ourselves, and hold only by precedent. Nay, he construes
even precedent with the most ingenious rigor; since the exclusion of
women from all direct contact with affairs can be made far more perfect
in a republic than is possible in a monarchy, where even sex is merged
in rank, and the female patrician may have far more power than the male
plebeian. But, as matters now stand among us, there is no aristocracy
but of sex: all men are born patrician, all women are legally plebeian;
all men are equal in having political power, and all women in having
none. This is a paradox so evident, and such an anomaly in human
progress, that it cannot last forever, without new discoveries in logic,
or else a deliberate return to M. Marechal's theory concerning the
alphabet.

Meanwhile, as the newspapers say, we anxiously await further
developments. According to present appearances, the final adjustment
lies mainly in the hands of women themselves. Men can hardly be expected
to concede either rights or privileges more rapidly than they are
claimed, or to be truer to women than women are to each other. True, the
worst effect of a condition of inferiority is the weakness it leaves
behind it; even when we say, "Hands off!" the sufferer does not rise.
In such a case, there is but one counsel worth giving. More depends on
determination than even on ability. Will, not talent, governs the world.
From what pathway of eminence were women more traditionally excluded
than from the art of sculpture, in spite of _Non me Praxiteles fecit,
sed Anna Damer?_--yet Harriet Hosmer, in eight years, has trod its full
ascent. Who believed that a poetess could ever be more than an Annot
Lyle of the harp, to soothe with sweet melodies the leisure of her lord,
until in Elizabeth Barrett's hands the thing became a trumpet? Where
are gone the sneers with which army surgeons and