concerns of each is an established principle.   But it is not only
through the sentiment of personal dignity, that the free direction
and disposal of their own faculties is a source of individual
happiness, and to be fettered and restricted in it, a source of
unhappiness, to human beings, and not least to women. There is
nothing, after disease, indigence, and guilt, so fatal to the
pleasurable enjoyment of life as the want o~ a worthy outlet for
the active faculties. Women who have the cares of a family, and
while they have the cares of a family, have this outlet, and it
generally suffices for them: but what of the greatly increasing
number of women, who have had no opportunity of exercising the
vocation which they are mocked by telling them is their proper one?
What of the women whose children have been lost to them by death or
distance, or have grown up, married, and formed homes of their own?
There are abundant examples of men who, after a life engrossed by
business, retire with a competency to the enjoyment, as they hope,
of rest, but to whom, as they are unable to acquire new interests
and excitements that can replace the old, the change to a life of
inactivity brings ennui, melancholy, and premature death. Yet no
one thinks of the parallel case of so many worthy and devoted
women, who, having paid what they are told is their debt to
society--having brought up a family blamelessly to manhood and
womanhood--having kept a house as long as they had a house needing
to be kept--are deserted by the sole occupation for which they have
fitted themselves; and remain with undiminished activity but with
no employment for it, unless perhaps a daughter or daughter-in-law
is willing to abdicate in their favour the discharge of the same
functions in her younger household. Surely a hard lot for the old
age of those who have worthily discharged, as long as it was given
to them to discharge, what the world accounts their only social
duty. Of such women, and of those others to whom this duty has not
been committed at all--many of whom pine through life with the
consciousness of thwarted vocations, and activities which are not
suffered to expand--the only resources, speaking generally, are
religion and charity. But their religion, though it may be one of
feeling, and of ceremonial observance, cannot be a religion of
action, unless in the form of charity. For charity many of them are
by nature admirably fitted; but to practise it usefully, or even
without doing mischief, requires the education, the manifold
preparation, the knowledge and the thinking powers, of a skilful
administrator. There are few of the administrative functions of
government for which a person would not be fit, who is fit to
bestow charity usefully. In this as in other cases (pre-eminently
in that of the education of children), the duties permitted to
women cannot be performed properly, without their being trained for
duties which, to the great loss of society, are not permitted to
them. And here let me notice the singular way in which the question
of women's disabilities is frequently presented to view, by those
who find it easier to draw a ludicrous picture of what they do not
like, than to answer the arguments for it. When it is suggested
that women's executive capacities and prudent counsels might
sometimes be found valuable in affairs of State, these lovers of
fun hold up to the ridicule of the world, as sitting in Parliament
or in the Cabinet, girls in their teens, or young wives of two or
three and twenty, transported bodily, exactly as they are, from the
drawing-room to the House of Commons. They forget that males are
not usually selected at this early age for a seat in Parliament, or
for responsible political functions. Common sense would tell them
that if such trusts were confided to women, it would be to such as
having no special vocation for married life, or preferring another
employment of their faculties (as many women even now prefer to
marriage some of the few honourable occupations within their
reach), have spent the best years of their youth in attempting to
qualify themselves for the pursuits in which they desire to engage;
or still more frequently perhaps, widows or wives of forty or
fifty, by whom the know- ledge of life and faculty of government
which they have acquired in their families, could by the aid of
appropriate studies be made available on a less contracted scale.
There is no country of Europe in which the ablest men have not
frequently experienced, and keenly appreciated, the value of the
advice and help of clever and experienced women of the world, in
the attainment both of private and of public objects; and there are
important matters of public administration to which few men are
equally competent with such women; among others, the detailed
control of expenditure. But what we are now discussing is not the
need which society has of the services of women in public business,
but the dull and hopeless life to which it so often condemns them,
by forbidding them to exercise the practical abilities which many
of them are conscious of, in any wider field than one which to some
of them never was, and to others is no longer, open. If there is
anything vitally important to the happiness of human beings, it is
that they should relish their habitual pursuit. This requisite of
an enjoyable life is very imperfectly granted, or altogether
denied, to a large part of mankind; and by its absence many a life
is a failure, which is provided, in appearance, with every
requisite of success. But if circumstances which society is not yet
skilful enough to overcome, render such failures often for the
present inevitable, society need not itself inflict them. The
injudiciousness of parents, a youth's own inexperience, or the
absence of external opportunities for the congenial vocation, and
their presence for an uncongenial, condemn numbers of men to pass
their lives in doing one thing reluctantly and ill, when there are
other things which they could have done well and happily. But on
women this sentence is imposed by actual law, and by customs
equivalent to law. What, in unenlightened societies, colour, race,
religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are
to some men, sex is to all women; a peremptory exclusion from
almost all honourable occupations, but either such as cannot be
fulfilled by others, or such as those others do not think worthy of
their acceptance. Sufferings arising from causes of this nature