mischievously, at the verdicts passed upon their own sex. If women were to enter into the practice of law, or become law-makers, an immense change would take place in all that relates to it. Absurd technicalities would be swept off its papers. One hundred words would no longer do duty for one. Simple, common-sense forms of expression would take the place of obsolete Latin and Norman-French. Daylight would be let into indictments, and flaws would soon be hard to find. No woman ever existed, whose patience would stand, in cases where meaning and law are evident, the absurd delays of chancery courts, or the still absurder "filing of objections," or "defining of terms," with which lawyers amuse a jury, and which Sir Leicester Dedlock, we are told, considered as the bulwarks of the English Constitution. This impatience of woman might not be very valuable, if she were to legislate alone; but, controlled by man's conservative caution, it will be of the greatest service. We are perpetually met by the opposition extended to _any thing_ that is new. It ought to be our object, therefore, to show, that for woman to claim and possess the right of suffrage is by no means a new thing. It is easy to show from the records of most nations, that women held and exercised political power so long as power was supposed to inhere _chiefly_ in property, and so long as women, either single or in association, possessed property not represented by men. Thus the suppression of religious houses in England put an end to the representation of abbesses. "Truly, we think more of money than of love," said one of the St. Simoniens: "we have more consideration for bags of dollars than human dignity. We emancipate women in proportion as they are property-holders; but, in proportion as they are women, our laws declare them inferior to us." It was only when the republican idea had crept to a certain extent into monarchical governments themselves, that women gradually dropped a recognized public influence which had depended on rank and wealth. What men have to do is, not to reconcile themselves to a woman's right to vote,--a right acknowledged hundreds of years ago, which is still covertly acknowledged when woman means property,--but to reconcile themselves to the idea that woman is a human being, and that _humanity_ has a right to vote. Wherever governments decide that every individual has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they must admit the right of the individual woman to vote, or deny the fact of her humanity. There is the dilemma. In support of this statement, I should have shown you, that in France, as early as the reign of Louis XIV., the political rights of property were respected in the persons of women. At the present day, the remains of the old feudal and communal system still secure a kind of political influence to certain women in the provinces, and often confer upon their husbands a right of franchise. In the reign of Louis XIV., the women who