stice or of policy. But of none of these rules of evidence will the
benefit be allowed to those who maintain the opinion I profess. It is
useless for me to say that those who maintain the doctrine that men
have a right to command and women are under an obligation to obey, or
that men are fit for government and women unfit, are on the
affirmative side of the question, and that they are bound to show
positive evidence for the assertions, or submit to their rejection.
It is equally unavailing for me to say that those who deny to women
any freedom or privilege rightly allowed to men, having the double
presumption against them that they are opposing freedom and
recommending partiality, must be held to the strictest proof of their
case, and unless their success be such as to exclude all doubt, the
judgment ought to go against them. These would be thought good pleas
in any common case; but they will not be thought so in this instance.
Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected not
only to answer all that has ever been said by those who take the
other side of the question, but to imagine all that could be said by
them--to find them in reasons, as well as answer all I find: and
besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative, I shall be called
upon for invincible positive arguments to prove a negative. And even
if I could do all this, and leave the opposite party with a host of
unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted one on
their side, I should be thought to have done little; for a cause
supported on the one hand by universal usage, and on the other by so
great a preponderance of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a
presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction which an appeal
to reason has power to produce in any intellects but those of a high
class.

I do not mention these difficulties to complain of them; first,
because it would be useless; they are inseparable from having to
contend through people's understandings against the hostility of
their feelings and practical tendencies: and truly the understandings
of the majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated
than has ever yet been the case, before they can be asked to place
such reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give
up practical principles in which they have been born and bred and
which are the basis of much of the existing order of the world, at
the first argumentative attac