Garrison or Phillips would have done; and, indeed, they would
give very much the same answers. What was the reason? Not that they were
half wise and half stupid; but that they were dull where their own
interests had not trained them, and they were sharp and keen where their
own interests were concerned.

I have no doubt that it will be so with women when they vote. About some
things they will be slow to learn; but about all that immediately concerns
themselves they will know more at the very beginning than many wise men
have learned since the world began. How long it took for English-speaking
men to correct, even partially, the iniquities of the old common law!--but
a parliament of women would have set aside at a single sitting the alleged
right of the husband to correct his wife with a stick no bigger than his
thumb. It took the men of a certain State of this Union a good many years
to see that it was an outrage to confiscate to the State one half the
property of a man who died childless, leaving his widow only the other
half; but a legislature of women would have annihilated that enormity by a
single day's work. I have never seen reason to believe that women on
general questions would act more wisely or more conscientiously, as a rule,
than men: but self-preservation is a wonderful quickener of the brain; and
in all questions bearing on their own rights and opportunities as women, it
is they who will prove shrewd and keen, and men who will prove obtuse, as
indeed they have usually been.

Another point that adds force to this is the fact that wherever women, by
their special position, have more at stake than usual in public affairs,
even as now organized, they are apt to be equal to the occasion. When the
men of South Carolina were ready to go to war for the "State-Rights"
doctrines of Calhoun, the women of that State had also those doctrines at
their fingers'-ends. At Washington, where politics make the breath of life,
you will often find the wives of members of Congress following the debates,
and noting every point gained or lost, because these are matters in which
they and their families are personally concerned; and as for that army of
women employed in the "departments" of the government, they are politicians
every one, because their bread depends upon it.

The inference is, that if women as a class are now unfitted for politics it
is because they have not that pressure of personal interest and
responsibility by