the most fundamental of the social relations is placed under the
rule of equal justice, and when human beings learn to cultivate
their strongest sympathy with an equal in nights and in
cultivation.  Thus far, the benefits which it has appeared that the
world would gain by ceasing to make sex a disqualification for
privileges and a badge of subjection, are social rather than
individual; consisting in an increase of the general fund of
thinking and acting power, and an improvement in the general
conditions of the association of men with women. But it would be a
grievous understatement of the case to omit the most direct benefit
of all, the unspeakable gain in private happiness to the liberated
half of the species; the difference to them between a life of
subjection to the will of others, and a life of rational freedom.
After the primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is the
first and strongest want of human nature. While
mankind are lawless, their desire is for lawless freedom. When they
have learnt to understand the meaning of duty and the value of
reason, they incline more and more to be guided and restrained by
these in the exercise of their freedom; but they do not therefore
desire freedom less; they do not become disposed to accept the will
of other people as the representative and interpreter of those
guiding principles. on the contrary, the communities in which the
reason has been most cultivated, and in which the idea of social
duty has been most powerful, are those which have most strongly
asserted the freedom of action of the individual--the liberty of
each to govern his conduct by his own feelings of duty, and by such
laws and social restraints as his own conscience can subscribe to. 
 He who would rightly appreciate the worth of personal independence
as an element of happiness, should consider the value he himself
puts upon it as an ingredient of his own. There is no subject on
which there is a greater habitual difference of judgment between a
man judging for himself, and the same man judging for other people.
When he hears others complaining that they are not allowed freedom
of action--that their own will has not sufficient influence in the
regulation of their affairs--his inclination is, to ask, what are
their grievances ? what positive damage they sustain? and in what
respect they consider their affairs to be mismanaged ? and if they
fail to make out, in answer to these questions, what appears to him
a sufficient case, he turns a deaf ear, and regards their complaint
as the fanciful querulousness of people whom nothing reasonable
will satisfy. But he has a quite different standard of judgment
when he is deciding for himself. Then, the most unexceptionable
administration of his interests by a tutor set over him, does not
satisfy his feelings: his personal exclusion from the deciding
authority appears itself the greatest grievance of all, rendering
it superfluous even to enter into the question of mismanagement. It
is the same with nations. What citizen of a free country would
listen to any offers of good and skilful administration, in return
for the abdication of freedom? Even if he could believe that good
and skilful administration can exist among a people ruled by a will
not their own, would not the consciousness of working out their own
destiny under their own moral responsibility be a compensation to
his feelings for great rudeness and imperfection in the details of
public affairs ? Let him rest assured that whatever he feels on
this point, women feel in a fully equal degree. Whatever has been
said or written, from the time of Herodotus to the present, of the
ennobling influence of free government--the nerve and spring which
it gives to all the faculties, the larger and higher objects which
it presents to the intellect and feelings, the more unselfish
public spirit, and calmer and broader views of duty, that it
engenders, and the generally loftier platform on which it elevates
the individual as a moral, spiritual, and social being--is every
particle as true of women as of men. Are these things no important
part of individual happiness ? Let any man call to mind what he
himself felt on emerging from boyhood--from the tutelage and
control of even loved and affectionate elders--and entering upon
the responsibilities of manhood. Was it not like the physical
effect of taking off a heavy weight, or releasing him from
obstructive, even if not otherwise painful, bonds? Did he not feel
twice as much alive, twice as much a human being, as before ? And
does he imagine that women have none of these feelings? But it is
a striking fact, that the satisfactions and mortifications of
personal pride, though all in all to most men when the case is
their own, have less allowance made for them in the case of other
people, and are less listened to as a ground or a justification of
conduct, than any other natural human feelings; perhaps because men
compliment them in their own case with the names of so many other
qualities, that they are seldom conscious how mighty an influence
these feelings exercise in their own lives. No less large and
powerful is their part, we may assure ourselves, in the lives and
feelings of women. Women are schooled into suppressing them in
their most natural and most healthy direction, but the internal
principle remains, in a different outward form. An active and
energetic mind, if denied liberty, will seek for power: refused the
command of itself, it will assert its personality by attempting to
control others. To allow to any human beings no existence of their
own but what depends on others, is giving far too high B premium on
bending others to their purposes. Where liberty cannot be hoped
for, and power can, power becomes the grand object of human desire;
those to whom others will not leave the undisturbed management of
their own affairs, will compensate themselves, if they can, by
meddling for their own purposes with the affairs of others. Hence
also women's passion for personal beauty, and dress and display;
and all the evils that flow from it, in the way of mischievous
luxury and social immorality. The love of power and the love of
liberty are in eternal antagonism. Where there is least liberty,
the passion for power is the most ardent and unscrupulous. The
desire of power over others can only cease to be a depraving agency
among mankind, when each of them individually is able to do without
it: which can only be where respect for liberty in the personal