his
voice and his gestures.

It is said that women, although superior in some respects to man--more
gentle, more sensitive, less subject to those vices which proceed from
egotism and hardness of heart--yet do not really possess the sentiment
of justice; that they obey rather their feelings than their
conscience. This observation is more correct, but it proves nothing;
it is not nature, it is education, it is social existence which
produces this difference.

Neither the one nor the other has habituated women to the idea of what
is just, but only to the idea of what is "honnete," or respectable.
Excluded from public affairs, from all those things which are judged
of according to rigorous ideas of justice, or according to positive
laws, the things with which they are occupied and which are affected
by them are precisely those which are regulated by natural feelings of
honesty (or, rather, propriety) and of sentiment. It is, then, unjust
to allege as an excuse for continuing to refuse to women the enjoyment
of all their natural rights motives which have only a kind of reality
because women lack the experience which comes from the exercise of
these rights.

If reasons such as these are to be admitted against women, it will
become necessary to deprive of the rights of citizenship that portion
of the people who, devoted to constant labour, can neither acquire
knowledge nor exercise their reason; and thus, little by little, only
those persons would be permitted to be citizens who had completed a
course of legal study. If such principles are admitted, we must, as a
natural consequence, renounce the idea of a liberal constitution. The
various aristocracies have only had such principles as these for
foundation or excuse. The etymology of the word is a sufficient proof
of this.

Neither can the subjection of wives to their husbands be alleged
against their claims, since it would be possible in the same statute
to destroy this tyranny of the civil law. The existence of one
injustice can never be accepted as a reason for committing another.

There remain, then, only two objections to discuss. And, in truth,
these can only oppose motives of expediency against the admission of
women to the right of voting; which motives can never be upheld as a
bar to the exercise of true justice. The contrary maxim has only too
often served as the pretext and excuse of tyrants; it is in the name
of expediency that commerce and industry groan i