Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected
not only to answer all that has ever been said bye who take the
other side of the question, but to imagine that could be said by
them--to find them in reasons, as I as answer all I find: and
besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative, I shall be
called upon for invincible positive arguments to prove a negative.
And even if I could do all and leave the opposite party with a host
of unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted
one on side, I should be thought to have done little; for a cause
supported on the one hand by universal usage, and on the r by so
great a preponderance of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a
presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction which an
appeal to reason has power to produce in intellects but those of a
high class. 

I do not mention these difficulties to complain of them; first, use
it would be useless; they are inseparable from having to contend
through people's understandings against the hostility their
feelings and practical tendencies: and truly the understandings of
the majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated
than has ever yet been the case, before they be asked to place such
reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give up
practical principles in which have been born and bred and which are
the basis of much existing order of the world, at the first
argumentative attack which they are not capable of logically
resisting. I do not therefore quarrel with them for having too
little faith in argument, but for having too much faith in custom
and the general feeling. It is one of the characteristic prejudices
of the ion of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, to d
to the unreasoning elements in human nature the infallibility which
the eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the
reasoning elements. For the apotheosis of Reason we have
substituted that of Instinct; and we call thing instinct which we
find in ourselves and for which we cannot trace any rational
foundation. This idolatry, infinitely more degrading than the
other, and the most pernicious e false worships of the present day,
of all of which it is the main support, will probably hold its
ground until it way before a sound psychology laying bare the real
root of much that is bowed down to as the intention of Nature and
ordinance of God. As regards the present question, I am going to
accept the unfavourable conditions which the prejudice assigns to
me. I consent that established custom, and the general feelings,
should be deemed conclusive against me, unless that custom and
feeling from age to age can be shown to have owed their existence
to other causes than their soundness, and to have derived their
power from the worse rather than the better parts of human nature.
I am willing that judgment should go against me, unless I can show
that my judge has been tampered with. The concession is not so
great as it might appear; for to prove this, is by far the easiest
portion of my task. 

The generality of a practice is in some cases a strong presumption
that it is, or at all events once was, conducive to laudable ends.
This is the case, when the practice was first adopted, or
afterwards kept up, as a means to such ends, and was grounded on
experience of the mode in which they could be most effectually
attained. If the authority of men over women, when first
established, had been the result of a conscientious comparison
between different modes of constituting the government of society;
if, after trying various other modes of social organisation--the
government of women over men, equality between the two, and such
mixed and divided modes of government as might be invented--it had
been decided, on the testimony of experience, that the mode in
which women are wholly under the rule of men, having no share at
all in public concerns, and each in private being under the legal
obligation of obedience to the man with whom she has associated her
destiny, was the arrangement most conducive to the happiness and
well-being of both; its general adoption might then be fairly
thought to be some evidence that, at the time when it was adopted,
it was the best: though even then the considerations which
recommended it may, like so many other primeval social facts of the
greatest importance, have subsequently, in the course of ages,
ceased to exist. But the state of the case is in every respect the
reverse of this. In the first place, the opinion in favour of the
present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker sex to the
stronger, rests upon theory only; for there never has been trial
made of any other: so that experience, in the sense in which it is
vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced
any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption of this system
of inequality never was the result of deliberation, or forethought,
or any social ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the
benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply
from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human
society, every woman owing to the value attached to her by men,
combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a
state of bondage to some man. Laws and systems of polity always
begin by recognising the relations they find already existing
between individuals. They convert what was a mere physical fact
into a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and
principally aim at the substitution of public and organised means
of asserting and protecting these rights, instead of the irregular
and lawless conflict of physical strength. Those who had already
been compelled to obedience became in this manner legally bound to
it. Slavery, from be inn a mere affair of force between the master
and the slave, became regularised and a matter of compact among the
masters, who, binding themselves to one another for common
protection, guaranteed by their collective strength the private
possessions of each, including his slaves. In early times, the
great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of
the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages of high