which, taking the care of people's lives out of their own hands,
and relieving them from the disagreeable consequences of their own
acts, saps the very foundations of the self-respect, self-help, and
self-control which are the essential conditions both of individual
prosperity and of social virtue-- this waste of resources and of
benevolent feelings in doing harm instead of good, is immensely
swelled by women's contributions, and stimulated by their
influence. Not that this is a mistake likely to be made by women,
where they have actually the practical management of schemes of
beneficence. It sometimes happens that women who administer public
charities--with that insight into present fact, and especially into
the minds and feelings of those with whom they are in immediate
contact, in which women generally excel men-- recognise in the
clearest manner the demoralising influence of the alms given or the
help afforded, and could give lessons on the subject to many a male
political economist. But women who only give their money, and are
not brought face to face with the effects it produces, how can they
be expected to foresee them ? A woman born to the present lot of
women, and content with it, how should she appreciate the value of
self-dependence ? She is not self-dependent; she is not taught
self-dependence; her destiny is to receive everything from others,
and why should what is good enough for her be bad for the poor? Her
familiar notions of good are of blessings descending from a
superior. She forgets that she is not free, and that the poor are;
that if what they need is given to them unearned, they cannot be
compelled to earn it: that everybody cannot be taken care of by
everybody, but there must be some motive to induce people to take
care of themselves; and that to be helped-to help themselves, if
they are physically capable of it, is the only charity which proves
to be charity in the end.  These considerations show how usefully
the part which women take in the formation of general opinion,
would be modified for the better by that more enlarged instruction,
and practical conversancy with the things which their opinions
influence, that would necessarily arise from their social and
political emancipation. But the improvement it would work through
the influence they exercise, each in her own family, would be still
more remarkable.  It is often said that in the classes most exposed
to temptation, a man's wife and children tend to keep him honest
and respectable, both by the wife's direct influence, and by the
concern he feels for their future welfare. This may be so, and no
doubt often is so, with those who are more weak than wicked; and
this beneficial influence would be preserved and strengthened under
equal laws; it does not depend on the woman's servitude, but is, on
the contrary, diminished by the disrespect which the inferior class
of men always at heart feel towards those who are subject to their
power. But when we ascend higher in the scale, we come among a
totally different set of moving forces. The wife's influence tends,
as far as it goes, to prevent the husband from falling below the
common standard of approbation of the country. It tends quite as
strongly to hinder him from rising above it. The wife is the
auxiliary of the common public opinion. A man who is married to a
woman his inferior in intelligence, finds her a perpetual dead
weight, or, worse than a dead weight, a drag, upon every aspiration
of his to be better than public opinion requires him to be. It is
hardly possible for one who is in these bonds, to attain exalted
virtue. If he differs in his opinion from the mass--if he sees
truths which have not yet dawned upon them, or if, feeling in his
heart truths which they nominally recognise, he would like to act
up to those truths more conscientiously than the generality of
mankind-- to all such thoughts and desires, marriage is the
heaviest of drawbacks, unless he be so fortunate as to have a wife
as much above the common level as he himself is.  For, in the first
place, there is always some sacrifice of personal interest
required; either of social consequence, or of pecuniary means;
perhaps the risk of even the means of subsistence. These sacrifices
and risks he may be willing to encounter for himself; but he will
pause before he imposes them on his family. And his family in this
case means his wife and daughters; for he always hopes that his
sons will feel as he feels himself, and that what he can do
without, they will do without, willingly, is the same cause. But
his daughters- -their marriage may depend upon it: and his wife,
who is unable to enter into or understand the objects for which
these sacrifices are made-- who, if she thought them worth any
sacrifice, would think so on trust, and solely for his sake--who
could participate in none of the enthusiasm or the self-approbation
he himself may feel, while the things which he is disposed to
sacrifice are all in all to her; will not the best and most
unselfish man hesitate the longest before bringing on her this
consequence? If it be not the comforts of life, but only social
consideration, that is at stake, the burthen upon his conscience
and feelings is still very severe. Whoever has a wife and children
has given hostages to Mrs. Grundy. The approbation of that
potentate may be a matter of indifference to him, but it is of
great importance to his wife. The man himself may be above opinion,
or may find sufficient compensation in the opinion of those of his
own way of thinking. But to the women connected with him, he can
offer no compensation. The almost invariable tendency of the wife
to place her influence in the same scale with social consideration,
is sometimes made a reproach to women, and represented as a
peculiar trait of feebleness and childishness of character in them:
surely with great injustice. Society makes the whole life of a
woman, in the easy classes, a continued self sacrifice; it exacts
from her an unremitting restraint of the whole of her natural
inclinations, and the sole return it makes to her for what often
deserves the name of a martyrdom, is consideration. Her
consideration is inseparably connected with that of her husband,
and after paying the full price for it, she finds that she is to
lose it, for no reason of which she can feel the cogency. She has
sacrificed her whole life to it, and her husband will not sacrifice
to it a whim, a freak, an eccentricity; something not recognised or