cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the
rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the one
slavery or of the other. By degrees such thinkers did arise; and
(the general progress of society assisting) the slavery of the male
sex has, in all the countries of Christian Europe at least (though,
in one of them, only within the last few years) been at length
abolished, and that of the female sex has been gradually changed
into a milder form of dependence. But this dependence, as it exists
at present, is not an original institution, taking a fresh start
from considerations of justice and social expediency--it is the
primitive state of slavery lasting on, through successive
mitigations and modifications occasioned by the same causes which
have softened the general manners, and brought all human relations
more under the control of justice and the influence of humanity. It
has not lost the taint of its brutal origin. No presumption in its
favour, therefore, can be drawn from the fact of its existence. The
only such presumption which it could be supposed to have, must be
grounded on its having lasted till now, when so many other things
which came down from the same odious source have been done away
with. And this, indeed, is what makes it strange to ordinary ears,
to hear it asserted that the inequality of rights between men and
women has no other source than the law of the strongest. 

That this statement should have the effect of a paradox, is in some
respects creditable to the progress of civilisation, and the
improvement of the moral sentiments of mankind. We now live--that
is to say, one or two of the most advanced nations of the world now
live--in a state in which the law of the strongest seems to be
entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the world's
affairs: nobody professes it, and, as regards most of the relations
between human beings, nobody is permitted to practise it. When
anyone succeeds in doing so, it is under cover of some pretext
which gives him the semblance of having some general social
interest on his side. This being the ostensible state of things,
people flatter themselves that the rule of mere force is ended;
that the law of the strongest cannot be the reason of existence of
anything which has remained in full operation down to the present
time. However any of our present institutions may have begun, it
can only, they think, have been preserved to this period of
advanced civilisation by a well-grounded feeling of its adaptation
to human nature, and conduciveness to the general good. They do not
understand the great vitality and durability of institutions which
place right on the side of might; how intensely they are clung to;
how the good as well as the bad propensities and sentiments of
those who have power in their hands, become identified with
retaining it; how slowly these bad institutions give way, one at a
time, the weakest first. beginning with those which are least
interwoven with the daily habits of life;and how very rarely those
who have obtained legal power because they first had physical, have
ever lost their hold of it until the physical power had passed over
to the other side. Such shifting of the physical force not having
taken place in the case of women; this fact, combined with all the
peculiar and characteristic features of the particular case, made
it certain from the first that this branch of the system of right
founded on might, though softened in its most atrocious features at
an earlier period than several of the others, would be the very
last to disappear. It was inevitable that this one case of a social
relation grounded on force, would survive through generations of
institutions grounded on equal justice, an almost solitary
exception to the general character of their laws and customs; but
which, so long as it does not proclaim its own origin, and as
discussion has not brought out its true character, is not felt to
jar with modern civilisation, any more than domestic slavery among
the Greeks jarred with their notion of themselves as a free people.

The truth is, that people of the present and the last two or three
generations have lost all practical sense of the primitive
condition of humanity; and only the few who have studied history
accurately, or have much frequented the parts of the world occupied
by the living representatives of ages long past, are able to form
any mental picture of what society then was. People are not aware
how entirely, informer ages, the law of superior strength was the
rule of life; how publicly and openly it was avowed, I do not say
cynically or shamelessly--for these words imply a feeling that
there was something in it to be ashamed of, and no such notion
could find a place in the faculties of any person in those ages,
except a philosopher or a saint. History gives a cruel experience
of human nature, in showing how exactly the regard due to the life,
possessions, and entire earthly happiness of any class of persons,
was measured by what they had the power of enforcing; how all who
made any resistance to authorities that had arms in their hands,
however dreadful might be the provocation, had not only the law of
force but all other laws, and all the notions of social obligation
against them; and in the eyes of those whom they resisted, were not
only guilty of crime, but of the worst of all crimes, deserving the
most cruel chastisement which human beings could inflict. The first
small vestige of a feeling of obligation in a superior to
acknowledge any right in inferiors, began when he had been induced,
for convenience, to make some promise to them. Though these
promises, even when sanctioned by the most solemn oaths, were for
many ages revoked or violated on the most trifling provocation or
temptation, it is probably that this, except by persons of still
worse than the average morality, was seldom done without some
twinges of conscience. The ancient republics, being mostly grounded
from the first upon some kind of mutual con;pact, or at any rate
formed by an union of persons not very unequal in strength,
afforded, in consequence, the first instance of a portion of human
relations fenced round, and placed under the dominion of another
law than that of force. And though the original law of force
remained in full operation between them and their slaves, and also