se feminisent_, said Buffon,--"The world is growing more
feminine." It is a compliment, whether the naturalist intended it or not.
Time has brought peace; peace, invention; and the poorest woman of to-day
is born to an inheritance of which her ancestors never dreamed. Previous
attempts to confer on women social and political equality,--as when
Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, made them magistrates; or when the
Hungarian revolutionists made them voters; or when our own New Jersey
tried the same experiment in a guarded fashion in early times, and then
revoked the privilege, because (as in the ancient fable) the women
voted the wrong way;--these things were premature, and valuable only
as recognitions of a principle. But in view of the rapid changes now
going on, he is a rash man who asserts the "Woman Question" to be
anything but a mere question of time. The fulcrum has been already
given in the alphabet, and we must simply watch, and see whether the
earth does not move.

There is the plain fact: woman must be either a subject or an equal; there
is no middle ground. Every concession to a supposed principle only involves
the necessity of the next concession for which that principle calls. Once
yield the alphabet, and we abandon the whole long theory of subjection and
coverture: tradition is set aside, and we have nothing but reason to fall
back upon. Reasoning abstractly, it must be admitted that the argument has
been, thus far, entirely on the women's side, inasmuch as no man has yet
seriously tried to meet them with argument. It is an alarming feature of
this discussion, that it has reversed, very generally, the traditional
positions of the sexes: the women have had all the logic; and the most
intelligent men, when they have attempted the other side, have limited
themselves to satire and gossip. What rational woman can be really
convinced by the nonsense which is talked in ordinary society around
her,--as, that it is right to admit girls to common schools, and equally
right to exclude them from colleges; that it is proper for a woman to sing
in public, but indelicate for her to speak in public; that a post-office
box is an unexceptionable place to drop a bit of paper into, but a
ballot-box terribly dangerous? No cause in the world can keep above
water, sustained by such contradictions as these, too feeble and slight
to be dignified by the name of fallacies. Some persons profess to think
it impossible to reason with a woman