He who would rightly appreciate the worth of personal independence as
an element of happiness, should consider the value he himself puts
upon it as an ingredient of his own. There is no subject on which
there is a greater habitual difference of judgment between a man
judging for himself, and the same man judging for other people. When
he hears others complaining that they are not allowed freedom of
action--that their own will has not sufficient influence in the
regulation of their affairs--his inclination is, to ask, what are
their grievances? what positive damage they sustain? and in what
respect they consider their affairs to be mismanaged? and if they
fail to make out, in answer to these questions, what appears to him a
sufficient case, he turns a deaf ear, and regards their complaint as
the fanciful querulousness of people whom nothing reasonable will
satisfy. But he has a quite different standard of judgment when he is
deciding for himself. Then, the most unexceptionable administration
of his interests by a tutor set over him, does not satisfy his
feelings: his personal exclusion from the deciding authority appears
itself the greatest grievance of all, rendering it superfluous even
to enter into the question of mismanagement. It is the same with
nations. What citizen of a free country would listen to any offers of
good and skilful administration, in return for the abdication of
freedom? Even if he could believe that good and skilful
administration can exist among a people ruled by a will not their
own, would not the consciousness of working out their own destiny
under their own moral responsibility be a compensation to his
feelings for great rudeness and imperfection in the details of public
affairs? Let him rest assured that whatever he feels on this point,
women feel in a fully equal degree. Whatever has been said or
written, from the time of Herodotus to the present, of the ennobling
influence of free government--the nerve and spring which it gives to
all the faculties, the larger and higher objects which it presents to
the intellect and feelings, the more unselfish public spirit, and
calmer and broader views of duty, that it engenders, and the
generally loftier platform on which it elevates the individual as a
moral, spiritual, and social being--is every particle as true of
women as of men. Are these things no important part of individual
happiness? Let any man call to mind what he himself felt on emerging
from boyhood--from the tutelage and control of even loved and
affectionate elders--and entering upon the responsibilities of
manhood. Was it not like the physical effect of taking off a heavy
weight, or releasing him from obstructive, even if not otherwise
painful, bonds? Did he not feel twice as much alive, twice as much a
human being, as before? And does he imagine that women have none of
these feelings? But it is a striking fact, that the satisfactions and
mortifications of personal pride, though all in all to most men when