But we must remember that all our American institutions are based on
consistency, or on nothing; all claim to be founded on the principles of
natural right, and when they quit those, they are lost. In all European
monarchies, it is the theory, that the mass of the people are children,
to be governed, not mature beings, to govern themselves. This is clearly
stated, and consistently applied. In the free states of this Union, we
have formally abandoned this theory for one half of the human race,
while for the other half it still flourishes in full force. The moment
the claims of woman are broached, the democrat becomes a monarchist.
What Americans commonly criticize in English statesmen, namely, that
they habitually evade all arguments based on natural right, and defend
every legal wrong on the ground that it works well in practice, is the
precise characteristic of our habitual view of woman. The perplexity
must be resolved somehow. We seldom meet a legislator who pretends to
deny that strict adherence to our own principles would place both sexes
in precisely equal positions before law and constitution, as well as in
school and society. But each has his special quibble to apply, showing
that in this case we must abandon all the general maxims to which we
have pledged ourselves, and hold only by precedent. Nay, he construes
even precedent with the most ingenious rigor; since the exclusion of
women from all direct contact with affairs can be made far more perfect
in a republic than is possible in a monarchy, where even sex is merged
in rank, and the female patrician may have far more power than the male
plebeian. But, as matters now stand among us, there is no aristocracy
but of sex: all men are born patrician, all women are legally plebeian;
all men are equal in having political power, and all women in having
none. This is a paradox so evident, and such an anomaly in human
progress, that it cannot last forever, without new discoveries in logic,
or else a deliberate return to M. Maréchal's theory concerning the