ve a higher right to be
excused from voting. We are unwilling to consume their delicate
fitnesses in this rude labor. It is not economical. We do not believe in
using silk for ships' top-sails, or China porcelain for wash-tubs. There
are tasks for American women--tasks, we mean, of a social and public,
not alone of a domestic nature--which only women _can_ rightly perform,
while their accomplishment was never more needed than here.

Mr. Phillips is no "faultless painter." He is given to snap-judgments.
The minor element of _considerateness_ should be more liberally present.
He forgets that fast driving is not suitable to crowded streets; and
through the densest thoroughfares the hoofs of his flying charger go
ringing over the pavements, to the alarm of many and the damage of some.
Softly, Bucephalus! A little gentle ambling through these social
complications might sometimes be well.

Again, while he has the utmost of moral stability and constancy, and
also great firmness of intellectual adhesion to main principles, there
is in him a certain minor changefulness. He pours out a powerful light,
but it flickers. Momentary partialities sway him,--to be balanced,
indeed, by subsequent partialities, for his broad nature will not be
permanently one-sided; but meantime his authority suffers. Mood,
occasion, the latest event, govern overmuch the color of his statement;
so that an unsympathetic auditor--and every partiality, by the law of
the world, must push _some one_ out of the ring of sympathy--may
honestly deem him unfair, even wilfully unfair.

Finally, he relies too much upon sarcasm and personal invective as
agents. He has a theory on this matter; and we feel _sure_ that it is
erroneous. Not that invective is to be forbidden. Not that personal
criticism is always out of place, or always useless. We are among the
"all men" whom Thoreau declared to be "enamored of the beauty of plain
speech." We ask no man in public or private life to wear a satin glove
upon his tongue. We believe, too, in the "noble wrath" of Tasso's
heroes, When the heart _must_ burn, let the words be fire. It is just
where personal invective begins to be used as matter of _theory and
system_ that it begins to be used amiss. Let the rule be to spare it, if
it _can_ be spared, and to use it only under the strictest compelling of
moral indignation. And were not Mr. Phillips among the most genial and
sunny of human beings, really incapable of any malign pas