thing to do. A single woman of independent fortune has a place in society, and may be an important and influential member of it. We are speaking for that class, be it large or small, whom we need not further define, towards which society has always been most hard and unsympathising, and who are legislated for in its parliament without being allowed represen

tatives or a voice.

We need scarcely say we are not advocating for ladies, single or otherwise, an admission to the learned professions. We do not desire to see them preachers, doctors, or lawyers; indeed, our own sex furnishes more than enough in all these departments, and the principle of self-defence comes in. We cannot doubt, however, that society might be so organized, with a view to the capabilities and powers of its members, as to find suitable employment for all. Nor are we bound to believe any acknowledged evil necessary, because we cannot suggest a sure remedy.

The heaviest complaints of oppression, however, to return to the grievances which form our subject-are made on the condition of married women. The law does not forbid spinsters earning money, nor keeping it when earned; but in the other case the wife earns money, it is said, for the husband to spend. The law will not allow her a separate purse. She has nothing, and can have nothing, of her own; and cases of great hardship are adduced, both in England and America, where a woman's hard-won money supports the husband in disgraceful extravagance. All these evils are laid to the blame of the law. But does the law do more than acknowledge that great primary law of the marriage state, they twain shall be one flesh?'— and could it interfere and make provision for imprudent, illadvised, and worldly marriages, and secure the wife from the natural consequences of a bad choice, whether made for her or by herself, wilfully or in ignorance, without weakening the strength of that most sacred tie in all cases, and impairing the impression of unity of interests, so essential to perfect unity of thought and feeling? No law can prevent an unfortunate marriage being the utmost evil that can befal a woman, though it could certainly mitigate some of its consequences. But the knowledge of a careful protection, by the law, of pecuniary interests, might encourage recklessness of choice, and might also remove some salutary checks on the indulgence of temper, discontent, and the whole train of matrimonial miseries. Other countries are adduced-France, Turkey, Hungary—where the laws of property are much more in favour of the wife; but we believe facts would fully show that in those countries marriages are neither so happy nor the wife so honoured and so secure as

in our own. But leaving the question of the disposition of inherited property, great point is made, as we have said, of the right of married women to the uncontrolled use of their own earnings, on the supposition that women of the higher classes might find time, in addition to their household cares, to pursue some regular employment or profession. Mr. Parker especially instances preaching and the practice of medicine as suitable occupations for the mistress of a family. And other American

authorities are rejoicing that the law has its female advocates. These peculiar pursuits sound as yet impossible extremes to English ears; but they are some amongst many means of earning money; and it is on this pecuniary ground alone that we now object to the suggestion. We believe that any additional encouragement to married women to devote themselves to earning money would be an evil.

We

It is very well for men intent on a theory to suppose, that because in some things the labours of women are lightened, therefore the mother and mistress of a family has indefinitely more time at her command than was formerly the case. assert confidently, with no fear of contradiction from any competent to judge, that there is now, as there always has been, and we doubt not always will be, occupation for all the best energies of even a gifted woman in the due performance of her conjugal, maternal, household, and social duties; and also that no household is conducted as well as it might and ought to be, where a woman's best powers are not devoted to her husband, her children, and her home. We say her best powers-all that is most choice, gifted, and original. If there is any part of herself that she withholds from these claimants, and devotes to some other purpose; if there is any channel for exertion and display for which she circumscribes and curtails her home efforts; if she is ever tempted to keep her second best for home, in order to lavish her affluence and freshness elsewhere, to weary herself in another service, and bestow only her worn-out energies on this smaller scene; if she ever suffers other spheres of so-called duty to interfere with the highest excellence she is capable of in these primary obligations; or if she allow talent and genius to tempt her into regarding as drudgery the work nature and Heaven have laid out for her, she betrays her trust, and errs fatally in that very article of duty most paramount and essential. And what a temptation to this error does the suggestion of an independent calling and separate interests offer! No doubt talent and genius, power of any kind, are designed for as wide a field as they can occupy, without forsaking this central point of home; and cases of gifted women will occur to every one, who have furthered the interests of their family while benefiting

a wider circle; but these must always be exceptions, and a woman's home concerns so entirely spread over her time that there must always be some danger of occupations wholly distinct, isolating and detaching her from them. For these home concerns' take a wide range, extending with the rank and position, not to speak of what are most commonly understood by maternal and household duties; the wife is the regulator of social intercourse; the small cares of society devolve upon her; she has to cultivate acquaintances and to cement friendships, for her husband's present enjoyment, and her children's future benefit. She is also her husband's almoner; the poor of her own parish or near neighbourhood should be personally known to her, for she cannot help them wisely without a knowledge of their character and circumstances; and when all these daily duties are attended to, we ask Mr. Parker where is the time for writing her Sunday sermons or visiting her patients, and are these to be her first consideration or her second? One or other, we venture to say, must go to the wall. Of the two it had certainly better be the sermon; but in reality we suspect that, in most cases, the public ministrations would gain the day. Seriously, in the perfect theory of a family the wife ought to have nothing to do with earning money. We know that in an imperfect state of things no perfect theory can be carried out, and we are quite willing to allow that in innumerable cases this ideal perfection must be abandoned; but we feel certain that in every model family that at this moment occurs to our readers, of whatever class, the wife is not what is called the bread-winner,—she has nothing whatever to do with this department. She is the economist, the wise dispenser, the manager, the money-spender of the family; and whenever she gives up these important offices to be merely one of the providers, she gives up her headship, and sinks into an inferior and less responsible office.

We have already touched upon the danger of the new system in the intellectual classes. But the poor may be supposed under a different law, and certainly where the rate of wages is too low, women do seem sometimes compelled to degenerate from managers into labourers. But, even here, the advantage we believe to be in most instances doubtful, and half her wages lost in the confusion and waste that reigns at home. In manufacturing districts, where the wages are higher, this is visibly the case. How many of the instances of deformity and disease amongst children may be traced to their mothers' having left them to the care of others while they went to work! and even where she has her work at home we have seen similar ill consequences, especially in sedentary employments, in which the children can take no part, and are only in the way. The monotony of

manual labour, allowing the mind to range off in dreams or mere vacuity, is preferred to the mental effort continually required to observe punctuality, and to keep things in order. The meals are neglected-the children sent out of doors to find companions in the street-the daughters left to follow their own devices-unswept, unwashed, unmended house, and household in perpetual confusion and discomfort: it is at this sacrifice. that a few additional shillings are added weekly by the wife to the family income.

Our argument, then, leads to the conclusion that married women, at least, have their duties prescribed to them too numerous and arduous to admit of their interference in another sphere, as a rule of ordinary practice. Nor can it be denied that this admssion throws another difficulty in the way of that wider field of occupation we would desire to see opened to women leading a single life. As marriage is a providential arrangement, it is not desirable that young women should settle the question for themselves, whether they shall marry or not, as the indignant daughters of Young America are disposed to do, when called upon not to be heroines but mothers of heroes; nor would previous settlement have any weight against inclination, when the moment for decision came. No calling then needing a special education, and involving such expenses as the settlement of sons require, would ever obtain the consent of a father, who would infallibly prefer, as mankind is constituted, seeing his daughter established in advantageous marriage, than in the solitary practice of some business or other calling, however adapted to be a woman's pursuit.

The other demand universally made by these advocates of progress is for political power-especially, and as a preliminary, the right of voting at elections. Many plausible things may be and are said on this point, such as that the noblest woman has no voice in the state, while drunken freemen decide many an election, and so forth, triumphantly repeating the argument, that thousands of women who are denied all legislative rights are better informed on the questions at issue than those who really decide them. But, in fact, the question is not to be considered under this intellectual test, but under those primary laws of a division of labour and duties between the sexes to which we have appealed. We believe that our women have great political influence as it is, and that they would not, in fact, increase it by the right of voting being imposed upon them; for that it would be an imposition upon the majority we are convinced. It is a fallacy to say, as these people do, no woman would be obliged to vote, for a right always involves a duty; and if, as the movement evidently supposes, the con

servative class of women refused the responsibility, and the agitators availed themselves of it, all power would be thrown at once into their hands, which must by no means be allowed, and there would infallibly ensue social and public disturbance, excitement, and female contentions, open to the ridicule of brother electors, and grievous to the taste and principles of the more feminine politicians, who are used to express their opinions and to receive deference for them in private, but who would find no fair arena for the exercise of their judgment in the tumult of men and men-like women, who would carry all before them, and alone be heard in large public assemblies. We do but touch, however, on this part of the subject, as our institutions are on no side considered ripe for this innovation, and at present the arguments against it reign in most minds of either sex undisturbed by doubt or question.

One topic, which might seem to bear on the present inquiry, we have not referred to, though of more general and practical interest than any balancing of theoretical rights or claims can be-we mean the existing laws of Divorce. But as these now stand, it is especially a man's question, and the aspect of the question has no exclusively feminine side, and we therefore do not enlarge further upon it here.

Our remarks have followed a devious course, and we fear have not assumed a very practical bearing. But it has not been our design to treat the matter ex cathedra, or to utter any stern assertion of our old-fashioned principles, which we have in fact supposed to be too universally shared by our readers to be necessary. This feminine movement is but one of the many questions on which the believers in progress and perfectibility will always be at issue with those who, following the Preacher, see nothing new under the sun, but the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; a conviction which, once firmly established in the mind, is so sustained and borne out by individual experience, that all opposite speculations will ever appear baseless visions. Yet, in some sense, the two contradictory views are to be reconciled. That which is done is indeed that which shall be done; and yet there is such a thing as progress. Man in himself remains the same in his nature, in his weakness, in his desires, in his joys and sorrows, in his trials and alleviations, in his brief life of small and, for the most part, insignificant cares and doings, whereby he is to prepare himself for a great future immortal existence. Yet society, of which he forms a part, all the while advances, the arts of life develop, opinion takes a higher stand. We should feel to have gone back and suffered loss in the moral atmosphere of fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand years ago; and yet this advanced public opinion does not really