by laying down as an ordinance of law, that the superstructure of
free government shall be raised upon a legal basis of despotism on
one side and subjection on the other, and that every concession
which the despot makes may, at his mere pleasure, and without any
warning, be recalled. Besides that no freedom is worth much when
held on so precarious a tenure, its conditions are not likely to be
the most equitable when the law throws so prodigious a weight into
one scale; when the adjustment rests between two persons one of whom
is declared to be entitled to everything, the other not only
entitled to nothing except during the good pleasure of the first,
but under the strongest moral and religious obligation not to rebel
under any excess of oppression. 

A pertinacious adversary, pushed to extremities, may say, that
husbands indeed are willing to be reasonable, and to make fair
concessions to their partners without being compelled to it, but
that wives are not: that if allowed any rights of their own, they
will acknowledge no rights at all in anyone else, and never will
yield in anything, unless they can be compelled, by the man's mere
authority, to yield in everything. This would have been said by
many persons some generations ago, when satires on women were in
vogue, and men thought it a clever thing to insult women for being
what men made them. But it will be said by no one now who is worth
replying to. It is not the doctrine of the present day that women
are less susceptible of good feeling, and consideration for those
with whom they are united by the strongest ties, than men are. On
the contrary, we are perpetually told that women are better than
men, by those who are totally opposed to treating them as if they
were as good; so that the saying has passed into a piece of
tiresome cant, intended to put a complimentary face upon an injury,
and resembling those celebrations of royal clemency which,
according to Gulliver, the king of Lilliput always prefixed to his
most sanguinary decrees. If women are better than men in anything,
it surely is in individual self-sacrifice for those of their own
family. But I lay little stress on this, so long as they are
universally taught that they are born and created for
self-sacrifice. I believe that equality of rights would abate the
exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present artificial ideal
of feminine character, and that a good woman would not be more
self-sacrificing than the best man: but on the other hand, men
would be much more unselfish and self-sacrificing than at present,
because they would no longer be taught to worship their own will as
such a grand thing that it is actually the law for another rational
being. There is nothing which men so easily learn as this
self-worship: all privileged persons, and all privileged classes,
have had it. The more we descend in the scale of humanity, the
intenser it is; and most of all in those who are not, and can never
expect to be, raised above anyone except an unfortunate wife and
children. The honourable exceptions are proportionally fewer than
in the case of almost any other human infirmity. Philosophy and
religion, instead of keeping it in check, are generally suborned to
defend it; and nothing controls it but that practical feeling of
the equality of human beings, which is the theory of Christianity,
but which Christianity will never practically teach, while it
sanctions institutions grounded on an arbitrary preference of one
human being over another. 

There are, no doubt, women, as there are men, whom equality of
consideration will not satisfy; with whom there is no peace while
any will or wish is regarded but their own. Such persons are a
proper subject for the law of divorce. They are only fit to live
alone, and no human beings ought to be compelled to associate their
lives with them. But the legal subordination tends to make such
characters among women more, rather than less, frequent. If the man
exerts his whole power, the woman is of course crushed: but if she
is treated with indulgence, and permitted to assume power, there is
no rule to set limits to her encroachments. The law, not
determining her rights, but theoretically allowing her none at all,
practically declares that the measure of what she has a right to,
is what she can contrive to get. 

The equality of married persons before the law, is not only the
sole mode in which that particular relation can be made consistent
with justice to both sides, and conducive to the happiness of both,
but it is the only means of rendering the daily life of mankind, in
any high sense, a school of moral cultivation. Though the truth may
not be felt or generally acknowledged for generations to come, the
only school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals.
The moral education of mankind has hitherto emanated chiefly from
the law of force, and is adapted almost solely to the relations
which force creates. In the less advanced states of society, people
hardly recognise any relation with their equals. To be an equal is
to be an enemy. Society, from its highest place to its lowest, is
one long chain, or rather ladder, where every individual is either
above or below his nearest neighbour, and wherever he does not
command he must obey. Existing moralities, accordingly, are mainly
fitted to a relation of command and obedience. Yet command and
obedience are but unfortunate necessities of human life: society in
equality is its normal state. Already in modern life, and more and
more as it progressively improves, command and obedience become
exceptional facts in life, equal association its general rule. The
morality of the first ages rested on the obligation to submit to
power; that of the ages next following, on the right of the weak to
the forbearance and protection of the strong. How much longer is
one form of society and life to content itself with the morality
made for another ? We have had the morality of submission, and the
morality of chivalry and generosity; the time is now come for the
morality of justice. Whenever, in former ages, any approach has
been made to society in equality, Justice has asserted its claims
as the foundation of virtue. It was thus in the free republics of