complimentary face upon an injury, and resembling those
celebrations of royal clemency which, according to Gulliver, the king
of Lilliput always prefixed to his most sanguinary decrees. If women
are better than men in anything, it surely is in individual
self-sacrifice for those of their own family. But I lay little stress
on this, so long as they are universally taught that they are born
and created for self-sacrifice. I believe that equality of rights
would abate the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present
artificial ideal of feminine character, and that a good woman would
not be more self-sacrificing than the best man: but on the other
hand, men would be much more unselfish and self-sacrificing than at
present, because they would no longer be taught to worship their own
will as such a grand thing that it is actually the law for another
rational being. There is nothing which men so easily learn as this
self-worship: all privileged persons, and all privileged classes,
have had it. The more we descend in the scale of humanity, the
intenser it is; and most of all in those who are not, and can never
expect to be, raised above any one except an unfortunate wife and
children. The honourable exceptions are proportionally fewer than in
the case of almost any other human infirmity. Philosophy and
religion, instead of keeping it in check, are generally suborned to
defend it; and nothing controls it but that practical feeling of the
equality of human beings, which is the theory of Christianity, but
which Christianity will never practically teach, while it sanctions
institutions grounded on an arbitrary preference of one human being
over another.

There are, no doubt, women, as there are men, whom equality of
consideration will not satisfy; with whom there is no peace while any
will or wish is regarded but their own. Such persons are a proper
subject for the law of divorce. They are only fit to live alone, and
no human beings ought to be compelled to associate their lives with
them. But the legal subordination tends to make such characters among
women more, rather than less, frequent. If the man exerts his whole
power, the woman is of course crushed: but if she is treated with
indulgence, and permitted to assume power, there is no rule to set
limits to her encroachments. The law, not determining her rights, but
theoretically allowing her none at all, practically declares that the
measure of what she has a right to, is