There was a time when all the women at the court of France blushed for one of their number who unluckily made use of a hard word in a _proper_ place. In like manner, the woman who reads law blushes to find herself even tolerably sincere and modest. It is not expected of her. Why has she never done any of the bad things the law so confidently predicts? All thinking people must see how easily we turn from the consolidated law of ages, with its false views, its untrue estimate of woman and duty, to the question of the right of suffrage. In 1848 and 1850, we used to hear a great deal of three objections to conferring this right upon women:-- 1st, Its incompatibility with household care and the duties of maternity. 2d, Its hardening effect on the character; politics not being fit for woman. 3d, The inexpediency of increasing competition in the already crowded fields of labor and office. To these three points we gave short and summary answers:-- 1st, There are a great many women who will never be mothers and housekeepers; and, if there were not, suffrage is no more incompatible with maternity and housekeeping than it is with mercantile life and the club-room. 2d, If it hardens women, it will harden men; and the politics which are not fit for her are not fit for him, nor will they become so till her presence gives men a motive to purify them. 3d, At the worst, competition could only go so far, that a man _and_ a woman would earn as little together as the man now does alone. This would be better than the present condition of things; for they would then be equal partners, and no longer master and slave. Both would work, and neither need pine. These answers, whether logical or not, have practically silenced the objections. We hear no more of _this_ nonsense. But, on the other hand, a respectable daily says, "As to the abstract right of a woman to vote because she is a human being and pays taxes, there is no such abstract right in any human being, male or female: the extent of the elective franchise is, and must ever be, limited by considerations of expediency." Then a distinguished review goes on to say, "that while the question of suffrage stands where it now does, so unsettled that every Congress and Parliament discuss it anew, we are glad that any thing should prevent the discussion as to conferring on woman a duty, the grounds of which are very vague and undetermined so far as regards men;" and a critic of Rosa Bonheur's magnificent pictures advises the "sad sisterhood of women's-rights advocates to visit the exhibition, and sigh to think how much one silent woman's hand outvalues for their cause the pathos and the jeers of their unlovely platform."