The children should bear the double name of their parents until marriage, when the daughters should keep the mother's name, and the sons the father's; or else, if we wish to bring into the question the system of liberty, it might be decreed that, on attaining majority, the child himself should choose which of the two names he would bear and transmit. II. READER. Now, let us take up the political right. AUTHOR. A nation is an association of free and equal individuals, co-operating, by their labor and contributions, to the maintenance of the common work; they have an incontestible right to do whatever is necessary to protect their persons, their rights and their property from injury. Man has political rights because he is free and the equal of his co-partners; according to others, because he is a producer and a tax-payer; now, woman being, through identity of species, free and the equal of man; being in point of fact, a producer and a tax-payer; and having the same general instincts as man, it is evident that she has the same political rights as he. Such are the principles, let us proceed to the application. We have said elsewhere, that it is not enough that a thing should be true in an absolute sense; it is necessary under penalty of transforming good into evil, to take into account the surroundings into which we seek to introduce it; this men too often forget, the _practical_ truth in our question is that it is profitable to recognize political rights _only to the extent to which it is demanded_, because those who do not demand it are intellectually incapable of making use of it, and because if they should exercise it, in a majority of cases, it would be against their own interests; Prudence exacts that we should be sure that the possessor of a right is really emancipated, and that he will not be the blind tool of a man or a party. Now, in the existing state of affairs, women not only do not demand their political rights, but laugh at those who address them on the subject; they pride themselves on being thought unfit for that which regards general interests; they recognize themselves therefore as incapable. On the other hand, they are minors civilly, slaves of prejudice, deprived of general education, submissive for the most part to the influence of their husbands, lovers or confessors, clinging as a majority to the ways of the past. If therefore they should enter without preparation into political life, they would either duplicate men or cause humanity to retrograde. You comprehend now why many women who are more capable than an infinite number of men of coöperating in great political acts, choose rather to renounce them than to compromise the cause of progress by the extension of political right to all women.