committee of the Bar Association
of the city of Boston of the application, and has received
elaborate briefs from the petitioner in support of her petition
and from two gentlemen of the bar as _amici curiae_ in opposition
thereto. The statute under which the application is made is as
follows: "A citizen of this State, or an alien who has made the
primary declaration of his intention to become a citizen of the
United States, and who is an inhabitant of this State, at the age
of twenty-one years and of good moral character, may, on the
recommendation of an attorney, petition the Supreme Judicial or
Superior Court to be examined for admission as an attorney,
whereupon the Court shall assign a time and place for the
examination, and if satisfied with his acquirements and
qualifications he shall be admitted." St. 1876, c. 107.

The word "citizen," when used in its most common and most
comprehensive sense, doubtless includes women; but a woman is
not, by virtue of her citizenship, vested by the Constitution of
the United States, or by the constitution of the commonwealth,
with any absolute right, independent of legislation, to take part
in the government, either as voter or as an officer, or to be
admitted to practice as an attorney. _Miuor vs. Happersett, 51
Wall. 162. Bradwell vs. Illinois, 16 Wall. 130._ The rule that
"words importing the masculine gender maybe applied to females,"
like all other general rules of construction of statutes, must
yield when such construction would be either "repugnant to the
context of the same statute," or "inconsistent with the manifest
intent of the legislature." Gen. Sts. c. 3, Sec. 7.

The only statute making any provisions concerning attorneys, that
mentions women, is the poor-debtor act, which, after enumerating
among the cases in which an arrest of the person may be made on
execution in an action of contract, that in which "the debtor is
attorney-at-law," who has unreasonably neglected to pay to his
client money collected, enacts, in the next section but one,
"that no woman shall be arrested on any civil process except for
tort." Gen. Sts. c. 124, Sec.Sec. 5, 7. If these provisions do not
imply that the legislature assumed that women should not be
attorneys, they certainly have no tendency to show that it