the most amazing benefits. These are the true advantages of
democracy."[2]

These passages and others like them are worth careful study. They clearly
point out the two different standards by which we may criticise all
political systems. One class of thinkers, of whom Froude is the most
conspicuous, holds that the "good of the people" means good laws and good
administration, and that, if these are only provided, it makes no sort of
difference whether they themselves make the laws, or whether some Caesar or
Louis Napoleon provides them. All the traditions of the early and later
Federalists point this way. But it has always seemed to me a theory of
government essentially incompatible with American institutions. If we could
once get our people saturated with it, they would soon be at the mercy of
some Louis Napoleon of their own.

When President Lincoln claimed, following Theodore Parker, that ours was
not merely a government for the people, but of the people, and by the
people as well, he recognized the other side of the matter,--that it is not
only important what laws we have, but who makes the laws; and that "the end
of a good government is to insure the welfare of a people," in this far
wider sense. That advantage which the French writer admits in democracy,
that it develops force, energy, and self-respect, is as essentially a part
of "the good of the governed" as is any perfection in the details of
government. And it is precisely these advantages which we expect that
women, sooner or later, are to share. For them, as for men, "the good of
the governed" is not genuine unless it is that kind of good which belongs
to the self-governed.

[Footnote 1: Sparks's _Franklin_, ii. 372.]

[Footnote 2: De Tocqueville, vol. ii. pp. 74, 75.]

RULING AT SECONDHAND

In the last century the bitter satirist, Charles Churchill, wrote a verse
which will do something to keep alive his name. It is as follows:--

"Women ruled all; and ministers of state
Were at the doors of women forced to wait,--
Women, who we oft as sovereigns graced the land,
But never governed well at second-hand."

He touches the very kernel of the matter, and all history is on his side.
The Salic Law excluded women from the throne of France,--"the kingdom of
France being too noble to be governed by a woman," as it said. Accordingly
the history of France shows one long line of royal mistresses ruling in
secret for mischief; while more libera