A number of women have asked whether De Girardin recognizes political right for women. He says nothing about it, either in his work "Liberty in Marriage," or in his "Universal Politics." But when a man writes that: "Woman, belonging to herself, and being dependent only on her reason, has the same rights as man to liberty and equality." That "universal suffrage should be _individual_ and _direct_." That "every holder of a general insurance has a right to be a party to it." It is evident that we may deduce, without any great stretch of logic, that, woman being _free and equal to man_, Woman being comprised in universality, Woman holding, like man, her policy of insurance, has a right, like man, to be elector, to be eligible to office, and to vote _individually and directly_. Now, as M. de Girardin is not one of those who recoil from the consequences of their principles, we are led to believe that he admits to woman the exercise of political right for woman. I have been told that, in 1848, one of those pitiable individuals who have neither intellect enough to be logical, nor justice enough to comprehend the oppressed, was haranguing before M. de Girardin against the claims of certain women to enter political life. "Why not?" asked M. de Girardin. "Do you believe that Madame de Girardin would deposit a less intelligent vote in the electoral urn than that of her footman?" If this anecdote be true, the opinion of the publicist concerning the political right of woman is not doubtful. _La liberté dans le mariage_ has raised a tempest of indignation, to a greater or less degree feigned, among the prudes; and for some time it required courage openly to proclaim one's self the (feminine) champion of the author. Abolish marriage! cry some, veiling their faces with an air of offended modesty. Make a speculation of love! exclaim others who, apparently, have preserved their holy innocence and baptismal ignorance. Come, ladies, we might say,--a truce to conventional delicacy and sentimentality. Let men suffer themselves to be deceived by our mask, nothing is more natural; but what is the use of playing the farce among women? M. de Girardin does not really suppress marriage; he changes it in some respects, but leaves it intact in a religious point of view. If his system should be adopted, therefore, you might be married in the presence of the clergymen of your respective faiths, precisely as was done some seventy years ago, and you would have no fewer scruples than your grandmothers, who believed themselves then sufficiently married. On the other hand, in suppressing civil marriage, the author does not interdict such and such particular stipulations; if therefore you hold in any degree to the religion of the Code, it will be lawful for you to stipulate in your notarial contract: 1. That you will be submissive to your husbands; 2. That you will permit them to manage your fortune, even contrary to your interests and to those of your children;