A woman, every reader will understand, would find it impossible to free herself from her obligations, like the men referred to in the text; nor is it desirable that she should _free herself_, but that the law should free her. [37] National Rev., Apr. 1861, pp. 291, 292. [38] "A man who is guilty of adultery is branded by public opinion as a forger or bigamist is elsewhere, and is not eligible to public office during the whole of his life; which, under such a government, is the greatest punishment that can be inflicted. A man who breaks his promise of betrothal, or who in any way betrays a woman to mortification and shame, is heaped with the same scorn that women receive elsewhere. The woman who is betrayed is censured; but the man is henceforth an outcast."--_Cottages of the Alps_, p. 288. [39] In reprinting for his collected works Mrs. Mill's article on "The Enfranchisement of Women," Mr. Mill more lately says, "All the more recent of these papers were the joint production of myself, and one whose loss, even in a merely intellectual point of view, can never be repaired or alleviated. But the following essay is hers in a peculiar sense; my share in it being little more than that of editor or amanuensis. Its authorship having been known at the time, and publicly attributed to her, it is proper to state, that she never regarded it as a complete discussion of the subject which it treats of; and, highly as I estimate it, I would rather it remained unacknowledged, than that it should be read with the idea, that even the faintest image can be found in it of a mind and heart, which, in their union of the rarest, and what are deemed the most conflicting excellences, were unparalleled in any human being that I have known or read of. While she was the light, life, and grace of every society in which she took part, the foundation of her character was a deep seriousness, resulting from the combination of the strongest and most sensitive feelings with the highest principles. All that excites admiration, when found separately, in others, seemed brought together in her,--a conscience at once healthy and tender; a generosity bounded only by a sense of justice, which often forgot its own claims, but never those of others; a heart so large and loving, that whoever was capable of making the smallest return of sympathy always received tenfold; and, in the intellectual department, a vigor and truth of imagination, a delicacy of perception, an accuracy and nicety of observation, only equalled by her profundity of speculative thought, and by a practical judgment and discernment next to infallible. So elevated was the general level of her faculties, that the highest poetry, philosophy, oratory, or art, seemed trivial by the side of her, and equal only to expressing some part of her mind; and there is no one of these modes