hawked and vended fish took up the business of the "insolvent fishmongers," and managed so well, that they acquired wealth, married their children into the first families, and finally became an estate of the realm. "Les Dames de la Halle," or "Dames of the Market," as they are called, have a corporate existence; and, if corporations have no souls, they ordinarily possess _franchises_! They have their queen, their laws, and a language peculiar to themselves. They take part in revolutions, and send deputations to the foot of the throne. Nor am I alluding now to long-past feudal or re-actionary crises. Louis Napoleon treats them as civilly as he does the clergy. When he was married, and when the young prince was born, they went to the Tuileries in their court-dress. Their princesses--and we are told that their blood-royal claims the higher privilege of beauty also--their princesses took the front rank in the procession, and offered bouquets to their imperial majesties. In response, Louis Napoleon gave to them what he gives to all corporations,--a very diplomatic speech. I have told you what was granted at Upsal in 1858. It is a curious fact, that, just at the moment when this question of suffrage was first agitated by the women of the United States assembled in convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, Pauline Roland and Madame Moniot publicly claimed their civil rights in Paris. Pauline went herself to the ballot, and, when her vote was refused, published a protest after the fashion of our tax-payers. Very absurd English society found woman's first demand for the suffrage; yet what Englishmen refuse contemptuously to _give to_ woman, certain men of the mean sort, yet calling themselves respectable, have not been ashamed in that very country to _borrow of_ her. Even "Blackwood" helps out our argument, when it says, in November, 1854, "I believe, Eusebius, I speak of a notorious fact, when I say, that it is less than a century since, for election purposes, parties were unblushingly married in cases where _women_ conveyed a right of freedom, a political franchise to their husbands, and parted, after the election, by shaking hands over a tombstone, as an act of dissolution of the contract, under cover of the words, 'Until death do us part.'"[40] The men who looked calmly on this profane and absurd fraud may well dread the moral influence of woman on elections. As to the historical argument for England, ladies of birth and quality, we are told, sat in council with the Saxon Witas. The Abbess Hilda _presided_ in an ecclesiastical council. "In Wightfred's great council at Benconceld in 694," says Gurdon in his "Antiquities of Parliament," "the abbesses sat and deliberated; and five of them signed decrees of that council, with the king and bishops:" and that illuminated prebendary of Sarum, old Thomas Fuller, thus further chronicles the same event:--