it, requires the co-operation of society with culture through universities, deliberative assemblies, independent judiciaries, and free executives, in the formation and execution of an intelligent, virtuous, wise, collective will.

Were Washington alive to-day and he would see what we have tried to point out, to wit: that the ballot-box is the vehicle of inchoate politics, of indefinite answers to crude public questions, put by platforms drawn up, to be "ticklers" for a self-deceived society. Would he not tell us, that it cannot be good government, except by accident, and that its bad government is but its logical outcome?

Society, to rule right, must become organic; or, the same thing, self-conscious. It must do, what nature does through organic matter, or it can neither have free parts nor be free as a whole. It must call out, from within itself, its superior intellects, virtues, and wisdom; its men of genius, talent, and discipline, men who learned to obey, before they claimed to rule, who were, however, never slavish in their obediences, nor arrogant in their governing; in short, men like Washington, Franklin, and Madison. That such men are now impossibilities, in American public life, is the severest condemnation of our "Inchoate Politics." It is the rule of unreason over reason; of arbitrary popular will over the collective will; of passion and prejudice over ethics. It is in public government, what exists in individual self-government, when the desires of the stomach, the eye, the ear, or carnal proclivities, are not subject to moral reason, but are the sole rule of human conduct.

The most serious difficulty of the inchoate political will is, however, the vagueness and uncertainty of its voice. It cannot speak, what it would say, and hence it is ever made to speak what it really does not wish to say. No sooner is its voice uttered, and disputes arise as to what it meant. In a country like America, we have thus superadded, to the perplexity of all government, the perplexity as to which inchoate will shall be the rule. This undermines the Constitution in its most vital basis, the understanding of and obedience to it, by the people. It is the same trouble, with the same consequences, as there was in ancient times with kings, who made divination the condition of their confidence; they would always be the victims of councils, which either accidentally or by shrewd guessing had the greatest semblance of truth. The pawing of his horse made Darius king; it expressed the will of an intelligent man, who precalculated the noble animal's action from natural reasons; and whenever the ballot-box speaks intelligently, it does so, because it expresses the forethoughts of wise leaders.

Did our people but reflect, while going through the political campaigns previous to elections, and they would see, that conventions, nominations, stump-speaking, editorials, public meetings, torch-light processions, &c., &c., are all very crude, very costly, actually degrading and deceptive methods; and that they cannot inject into inchoate politics, what never can be in them, a per se intelligent and intelligible expression.

And it is fortunate, that very often, as in the election of Jackson, the men chosen did not carry out the inchoate public will of those who voted for them, but obeyed their own subsequent better judgment, formed by being brought in contact with superior minds, and the agencies by which, if at all, a good collective will can be formed.

Two processes, often resorted to in olden times-first, that of the Saxons, Franks, &c., submitting previously-prepared and well-digested propositions to popular sanction; second, that of placing the popular edicts under the reflection and action of authoritative men-are left out in our governmental idealities. According to our theory, we neither prepare for the people, nor compare after them. Our plebiscites are ballot-boxes with mute votes in them, voted by men deaf on one ear, that of the country, and acutely open, to party noises, on the other. No wonder that each election is but an expensive burial of much writing and speaking.

In conclusion, and summing up the whole subject, we concede, that in Europe up to the French Revolution the inchoate public wills were not allowed their proper share in government; but insist on it, that since, and particularly in America, they have usurped an undue share. Progress, in political matters, has accordingly been useful and beneficial as long as, in pursuance of a wise object, right after right, or if you please freedom after freedom, was given to social enhancements within limits fixed by the wiser, more virtuous, and intelligent portion of society; but as soon as this line was crossed and the inchoate wills took the reins and tyrannized over, or subjected the collective will to their sway, then began a destructive course, with which the permanent welfare of society becomes incompatible and produces anarchy and demoralization. At that worst stage1 America would long ago have arrived, if it were not, that within its wide domain and great natural resources the intensifications of wrongs were always only temporary, and never very intense or destructive.

1 Those whom it will interest to know, which stage is the worst, will find it described in the Edinburgh Review, April 1877, under the title "Brigandage in Italy." In principle we have the mafia all over the country, and not in the south alone.

CHAPTER XXV.

AMERICAN WOMEN POLITICALLY AND SOCIALLY CONSIDERED.

"I gave all the money I had and one good-sized person besides to my country, and yet I can't vote!"-Dr. Susan A. Edson.

THE reasoning contained in the foregoing quotation would be unanswerable, if giving money to or serving a country were the criterion for conferring the elective franchise; and it is not, because we wish to depreciate her services or gifts, that we tell her, that she is mistaken, and that the right to vote rests upon entirely different reasons. The lady had served with great success in the sanitary department of our late war, and she received, as she was entitled to, the special commendation of the commander-in-chief as well as the other officers who knew her merits. We know, that the lady herself would recoil from the proposition to confer the franchise on all who labored in the hospital service; especially if she reflected, that her logic would carry this right both to those who aided the North as well as those, who stood by the South. It would also call, for letting all youth under eighteen vote who were in the war, and also all foreigners. There may be injustice in denying adult females the right to vote in a country where this right goes per capita to all adult males; but her qualification contains an equally unjust reflection against all persons, who served their country at home. That these are the better voters, if the permanency of the nation and the welfare of society is the object, even Mrs. Edson will admit. Perhaps she would join us also in holding, that the unsafest voters are persons who assist a people in their strifes?

Considering the conflicting views which are abroad, it seems to us proper to present a few general observations by way of predication and with a view to path-finding on this topic.

Society stands to-day in the midst of a series of abrogations of arbitrary conferments, as well as exclusions from the elective franchise and other political rights. In America we have nearly touched bottom as to the universality of the right; but no one will say, that we have risen to the height of an intelli

gent use of the ballot-box, so as to make it express truth and good sense to the listening statesman. We have preserved in corporation elections and a few other concerns, the right of sensitive interests to control the direction of these bodies; but in all public matters we have drowned the mental capacities of our population beneath the mere physical per capita voting qualification. We may have to go to the final conclusions, of this our course, and remove every barrier to the exercise of the franchise as to persons, who have heads on their shoulders, and it may indeed be wise to assist in this culmination. But the only justification of these steps will be the fact, that society will then be compelled, by overwhelming necessity, to take up the subject anew and to readjust it on a correcter basis, and for better reasons, than per capita voting, and the right to govern with the ballot-box, gives. The query is, however, allowable : whether we had not better now take up the subject by the test of principle? Or, putting the issue as the "women question," we ask: Whether the women, who are so justly alarmed at the work of our present elections, had not better insist now on a radical reconsideration of the whole subject? We men are told that we are too late, that a franchise once conferred cannot be either taken away nor altered so as to take away its abuse for mischief. And this suggests the inquiry: whether, after we have beside universal male suffrage also universal female suffrage, we shall not then have a double, too late?

Believing that now is the time for discussion, we present, as the initial point, by fastening to which we may get out of the labyrinth of sophistries into which the war, or rather its partisan causes, have plunged us, the wise maxim of Solon:

"Public safety does not consist in giving all liberties to all; but in conferring on each respectively the rights and the functions, in which they are most useful to the State and themselves."

Apply this standard to the subject before us, and it directs our inquiries to the relations of the adult females to society and the State. And a very short consideration brings us at once to those three, universally confessed to be good, relations: those of wife, mother, and the economic head of a family. A distinguished writer has well said: "There can be no noble society in the true sense without the first two in proper form; nor no rich nation without wise housewives." There are degrees of usefulness and variations in form, but it is self-evident, that society and states are there best organized, where most adult females are carrying out, in freedom, the already-named triune social functions. There all are most sure to have the greatest comforts in housekeeping; the best tastes in matters of propriety

and of beauty; the soundest morals through good wives; the wisest outlook to the future through motherly care; and the best use as well as saving of male production and income. The past, present, and the future will then be best linked together, and there will be a perennial fountain of stability, wealth, and security. It is so, because there women fulfil, with the fewest exceptions, those relations, which nature, social necessities, and political institutions everywhere assign to them as the positions in which they are most useful. And it has been, as we shall see, the happy effect of past American social conditions, to facilitate the attainment of this status in a high degree for the largest number of women.

The three functions of woman, of which we have spoken, get each their most vital as well as most proper development in the privacies of life, while the work of man is chiefly public; for it relates to the production of means for the family, which must be accomplished through more or less strife with others. But man gets his main recuperative energies at home, and he cannot get them anywhere else as well, if at all. And if woman fails him there, he lacks the standbye in life, which he so much needs. Any social condition, therefore, that either unsettles family life and its privacies, or interferes with the constant recuperation of male energies, invades and disturbs social order. The sure indications of this unhappy social condition exist, when either men or women look largely for comfort outside of family life; and especially, when women in large numbers quit their private sphere and become public persons. Then they grow into a sort of defective male; society loses both its economic as well as moral balance, and the body-politic ceases to evolve true ethics; for then, all being out of their proper place, they originate all kinds of spasmodic efforts at curing the social evils which all soon begin to feel, which then however few understand, and which none have the capacity to probe closely, and to correct radically by themselves alone. We cannot particularize any special form hereof, for they are manifold, from the most ecstatic asceticism to the grossest austerities; and from slippery libertinism to weak but pureminded platonic idealities.

Until America was discovered, Europe had to combat the various excrescences, that grew out of the abnormal social relations of the sexes, which the constant wars produced, as best it could, by its own interactions and reactions. Both the lower, as well as the higher orders of society, had more faulty females than now. And only in the middle classes were women, who fulfilled well the triune functions of which we have spoken.