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ish passions are roused by opposition, to be able to feel how far these should be repressed, and the wishes or objects of another admitted as prior in right.

It is only the daily habit of viewing our own conduct and principles, as we might suppose another would view them, that will make us capable of judging another as we would judge ourselves. The questions," What is right? "What is true? must be habitually supreme, and arise almost spontaneously before any desires or affections are listened to, if we would maintain ourselves in that frame of mind which can hold the even balance between our claims and those preferred against them. In this form of justice, at least, women are less deficient than men. Saved from the evil influence of that systematic selfishness in which the latter are in general trained from childhood, they are more free from one great source of partiality and injustice. Even while blind, perhaps, to the reason and justice. of claims or rights urged against prepossessions or prejudices, in which their feelings are strongly enlisted on the side of one or the other of the contending parties, their own unselfish nature, unused to struggle proudly even for just rights, is more easily brought to acknowledge the fairness of what opposes only its own will and interest.

Injustice in this respect arises as often perhaps from mere want of thought as from selfishness, and many a mind which would revolt from the least infringement of the rights of others, if proposed in a form sufficiently striking to induce reflection, has gone on year after year, without intentional departure from integrity or good feeling, in a systematic course of injustice to which long habit has blinded it. Look through the long history of the oppression of one class by another, of one sex by the other, of one nation by another, and who can doubt that many among the oppressors, among the unfairly privileged, among the conquering race, among domestic despots, and among slaveowners themselves, have been men of upright intentions and good feeling, but who, from want of scrutinizing their position and its duties, and their own principles of action,— from want of considering what they themselves would feel under certain

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conditions, have persevered in a course of injustice which serious reflection would have made abhorrent to them. arises a feeling almost of awe when we turn to examine ourselves, after contemplating in others such instances of the effect of custom and thoughtlessness, in perverting our better nature.

Integrity of mind, which comprehends all the moral results of love of truth, determines the character of a woman's influence. We need scarcely point out its value in the education of children, for how, but by a mother's daily example, shall they be inspired with the love of truth, and with that confidence in virtue which is the best foundation for its future practice? If the child's implicit trust in his mother be deceived, the man's faith in all integrity is dangerously shaken, and between disbelief in virtue and indulgence of vice there is but one short and easy step.

The wife's influence depends no less than the mother's on her integrity. It will save her from the practice of petty artifices and the love of petty mysteries, which must irritate her husband, weaken his confidence, and thereby endanger conjugal happiness. Influence properly exerted is the triumph of moral power; when abused, it is the victory of artifice over moral weakness. Its possession, therefore, without some guarantee for its proper exercise, is alike dangerous to those who wield and those who obey it, and this guarantee exists only in the integrity of its possessor. Artifice and cunning are too often regarded as the lawful arms of the weak, but every wife should remember that her real and only lasting power lies in moral influence, and that this is lessened by whatever lowers her character or shakes her husband's confidence. If she desires to be regarded as a wife, not as a mistress, if she prefers being valued as his friend and helpmate to being flattered and trifled. with as his toy, she will be careful to use no influence but that of reason and goodness, to let no artifice degrade the playful tenderness which in itself has so winning a charm, and to preserve unsullied the integrity on which depends his confidence.

and esteem.

Having fully admitted the faults of women in these respects,

their partiality and tendency to dissimulation, it is but fair to point out how these faults are fostered by the position in which they are placed. That position depends not on their own merits, not on any acknowledged rights, but on the character of the men they happen to be connected with. As this character is amiable or the reverse, they meet with kindness, with lavish indulgence, or with every degree of harshness and ill-usage; but simple justice is never awarded them. Whether in the laws of the country, in the conventional rules of society, or in the habits of domestic life, the just claims of women are never taken into consideration, and the gradual ameliorations in their condition, which have raised them from household slaves to their present position, have been always regarded as concessions made by more indulgent and civilized masters, not as the acknowledgment of actual rights. While the caprice of a husband or father is the sole arbiter of a woman's happiness or misery, it is hard to tax her with the want of that keen sense of justice, which, if she had it, would perhaps make her life intolerable.

The habit of yielding to feeling, which is the source of so much female partiality, is also fostered by the very men who censure so severely the faults which result from it. In men's portraiture of female character, we generally find that their beau-ideal of female excellence is the mere creature of feeling, and that even the weaknesses into which that uncontrolled feeling betrays her are more amiable in their eyes than virtues of a sterner kind. In their horror of female independence, they are apt to represent strength of mind, judgment, and decision as unfeminine; no wonder that women, thus practically taught that the admiration and devotion of the other sex are won by any thing rather than the nobler qualities of heart and intellect, should be found deficient in them! When women shall have generally a keen sense of justice, and a contempt for the petty arts which wheedle a man into granting as an indulgence that which ought to have been conceded as a right, much else around them must also be changed.

We do not say these things in the mean spirit of recrimination, which tries to palliate a fault by accusing another; we

say them to prove the necessity of raising women's own estimate of their position, and of their moral equality with men, which will gradually raise them in the eyes of the latter; for the best argument for the concession of a right is to show that the claimants are worthy to exercise it. We say them also because the remedy is in great measure in women's own hands. Let them cultivate in themselves the love of truth, the spotless integrity which shall raise them above suspicion; let them train their sons by their own example to that high sense of justice which shall insure the protection of the weak, and the next generation will cease to hear of the oppression of the one sex, or the artifice and partiality of the other.

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CHAPTER VI.

LOVE OF MORAL EXCELLENCE.

It has been well and eloquently said, in speaking of the distinctive attributes of man, that "It is the love of the great, and the good, and the beautiful, detached from all personal, and even from all individual interests, which makes him in a true sense a man, and establishes a sensible relation between himself, and somewhat more extended, more durable than the world."

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This principle, like the love of truth, may be considered under two aspects: as it affects our moral nature, or our intellect. When acting on the latter, it becomes the source of the higher efforts of imagination, of all that is beautiful in art, sublime in poetry, and inventive in science. When it is developed in the moral nature, it becomes one of the strongest motives to virtue, and from the love of goodness, purity, and truth, rises to its full consummation in the love of God. That virtue of which it is not the motive, that religion of which it is not the essence, are the offspring of fear or of superstition, and deserve not the sacred names which they venture to assume.

We shall revert hereafter to the influence of this lofty affection of the mind on imagination, and those arts which flow from it; here our remarks will be confined exclusively to its moral effects on character. Few inquiries are more important; for if we find that the love of goodness and truth is the ruling motive of every really virtuous act, we at once exclude all those lower motives which have led some philosophers to suppose that vir

* Woman's Rights and Duties, Vol. I. p. 288.

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