r understanding of political questions than the
brightest woman. He did not find it convenient to say what must be the
condition of a nation which for many years has had a woman for its
sovereign; but he certainly said bluntly what many men feel. It is not
indeed very hard to find the source of this feeling. It is not merely that
women are inexperienced in questions of finance or administrative practice,
for many men are equally ignorant of these. But it is undoubtedly true of a
large class of more fundamental questions,--as, for instance, of some now
pending at Washington,--which even many clear-headed women find it hard to
understand, while men of far less general training comprehend them
entirely.

Questions of the distribution of power, for instance, between the
executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government,--or between
the United States government and those of the separate States,--belong to
the class I mean. Many women of great intelligence show a hazy
indistinctness of views when the question arises whether it is the business
of the general government to preserve order at the voting-places at a
congressional election, for instance, as the Republicans hold; or whether
it should be left absolutely in the hands of the state officials, as the
Democrats maintain. Most women would probably say that so long as order was
preserved, it made very little difference who did it. Yet, if one goes into
a shoe-shop or a blacksmith's shop, one may hear just these questions
discussed in all their bearings by uneducated men, and it will be seen that
they involve a principle. Why is this difference? Does it show some
constitutional inferiority in women, as to this particular faculty?

The question is best solved by considering a case somewhat parallel. The
South Carolina negroes were considered very stupid, even by many who knew
than; and they certainly were densely ignorant on many subjects. Put face
to face with a difficult point of finance legislation, I think they would
have been found to know even less about it than I do. Yet the abolition of
slavery was held in those days by many great statesmen to be a subject so
difficult that they shrank from discussing it; and nevertheless I used to
find that these ignorant men understood it quite clearly in all its
bearings. Offer a bit of sophistry to them, try to blind them with false
logic on this subject, and they would detect it as promptly, and answer it
as keenly, as