desirous, to rob the labourer of his hire, impressment is no longer
advocated. Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing
all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a similar
retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be,
that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women,
as to induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is not
a sign of one's thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when
one allows only Hobson's choice, "that or none." And here, I believe,
is the clue to the feelings of those men, who have a real antipathy
to the equal freedom of women. I believe they are afraid, not lest
women should be unwilling to marry, for I do not think that any one
in reality has that apprehension; but lest they should insist that
marriage should be on equal conditions; lest all women of spirit and
capacity should prefer doing almost anything else, not in their own
eyes degrading, rather than marry, when marrying is giving themselves
a master, and a master too of all their earthly possessions. And
truly, if this consequence were necessarily incident to marriage, I
think that the apprehension would be very well founded. I agree in
thinking it probable that few women, capable of anything else, would,
unless under an irresistible _entrainement_, rendering them for the
time insensible to anything but itself, choose such a lot, when any
other means were open to them of filling a conventionally honourable
place in life: and if men are determined that the law of marriage
shall be a law of despotism, they are quite right, in point of mere
policy, in leaving to women only Hobson's choice. But, in that case,
all that has been done in the modern world to relax the chain on the
minds of women, has been a mistake. They never should have been
allowed to receive a literary education. Women who read, much more
women who write, are, in the existing constitution of things, a
contradiction and a disturbing element: and it was wrong to bring
women up with any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or of a
domestic servant.

[Footnote 1: Title-page of Mme. de Stael's "Delphine."]

CHAPTER II.

It will be well to commence the detailed discussion of the subject by
the particular branch of it to which the course of our observations
has led us: the conditions which the laws of this and all other
countries annex to the marriage contract. Marriage being the
dest