YOU ask me, my dears, to give you

my opinion of your aunts and some other women-very few, not one in fifty, that is one comfort agitating for the right, as they call it, of voting for members, and of sitting as members themselves, of the township council. I think I am competent to give an opinion. I was little more than seventeen when I first came to Newfangle, which was then an unbroken, uninhabited wilderness. It is now one of the finest townships in the Province, supporting in great comfort and plenty-luxuries not wanting-a population of more than two thousand souls. The whole process of the transformation has passed under my own eye. I am now seventy-seven. I know how it has been done, and by whom it has been done. I know, therefore, in what consists the right to any part or voice in its government.

These ladies are so solemnly serious, and seem so honestly sincere, they are so earnest, in what they say it is very hard to understand it, but so it is -that one would not wish to throw ridicule on them, if it could be helped. But it is certainly extremely difficult to listen with gravity to some things that they say. I can hardly keep my countenance when they get up on the table in the town hall and harangue the people. They expatiate pathetically on the shocking wrongs that have been inflicted by man upon woman. It is always 'man' and woman' with them. They give us an imaginative history of our sad sufferings since the creation, only that I notice they never go quite so far back as Eve and the apple.

--

They tell us that woman was first a slave,' then a toy or an idol,' and lastly so late indeed as 1863-could 'be taken to market and sold by a "brutal husband," like a sheep or a cow.' I see a parcel of meek men standing around with their lips popping open in stupid wonder to find themselves lords of the creation, when they had no more idea of it than of being lords spiritual or temporal. I notice that some of them begin to plume themselves, hold themselves very erect, and throw their chests open. But I see, too, and it makes me creep, an expression breaking out on the face of some brutal husband,' when the selling in the market is spoken of, which shows that he is saying to himselfBy George, what a chance lost! Bless my milky stars, if I had but known it in time!'

Whose slave, I wonder, was the Queen of Sheba? Whose Boadicea? Can it be that Elizabeth was ever any body's toy, or Anne anybody's idol? Catherine, one of the examples of great women brought forward by these ladies (there is no accounting for choice), was, to be sure, the toy of a good many, and rather a dangerous one too, I should imagine. And I do not know where you would find idols much more cruel and bloodthirsty than Mary and, I fear we must add, Isabella of Castile, gorging themselves with sacrifices of flames and blood. Did it ever enter into the head of George IV., we may wonder, to put a halter round his wife's neck (she was a sad thorn in his side) and lead her to Smithfield and sell her for a shilling-that, I believe, was the ruling figure-to some drover?

He could have done it, you see. 'The law allows it and the court awards it,' at least it did, as late as 1863, so these Portias tell us.

The names of these Queens are brought forward to show that women are capable of ruling men. Shall we alter the phrase, and say that men are capable of being ruled by them? But, my dears, could the bitterest opponents of these ladies desire anything better? The very fact that men have made queens of women-and of even such women as most of them were to be ruled by them and have their royal heels placed upon their necks--the royal axe at times and the royal faggot-disposes at once of all such inventions as slaves, toys-not idols, perhaps, as we have seen-and cows and sheep. You cannot eat your apple and have it. Will you keep your slaves or your queens? Which?

The same fatal exposure awaits the production of the names of other great women to show how great women can be. The fact that there have been great women, and that they have shown themselves to be great, proves positively that the opportunity to become great was not denied them. We shall be told, no doubt, that they became great in spite of their trammels and chains. To be sure. That is how genius forces its way, whether in men or women. Let us mention one or two of each at random. Faraday and Charlotte Bronte and Dickens the blacking-boy. Beat those instances if you can. Ör George Stephenson, or Madame Albani, one of our own Canadian girls. Oh, sad, sad! Downtrodden, enslaved woman! Your wings cruelly clipped; access to your kind denied you, a fair field for your genius closed with iron doors against you! The passionate Charlotte chained to a rock on a bleak Yorkshire moor! Shocking! And done, too, of set purpose and with malice aforethought by the men of Yorkshire! And Jane Eyre' lost to the world! For how long may we look for its like from any Girton Col

lege in Christendom? George Eliot,' with whose name the world would have rung, robbed of her five thousand pounds for her second novel! The countless gains of Madame Patti is no more than what might have been! And then, oh, thou tyrant man, what dost thou not thyself lose by all this! What unheard of fatuity!

This, my dears, is the sort of thing which is offered to your young intelligence from the platforms of Newfangle. This is by way of improvement in the education of women. But this is not all. One of these ladies once told the men to their faces, with some other compliments of the same kind, that they were the 'lower and coarser half of humanity.' At least, it was said in some way or other interrogatively, I believe, but it comes to the same thing. It is affirmed, they were told, that men are less pure and noble in their moral instincts,' whatever that may mean, than women. But, my dears, I would contrast those speeches with the purity and nobility of the men, who, under such gross provocation as that, refrained from any rude or indecent retort. Perhaps you might hear them muttering, 'Come, that is rather strong,' or coarse yourself, what do you call that for coarse?' or 'how will you set about to prove that, my lady, it is not quite so clear as that two and two make four; you may say that nine is a greater number than ten, if you like, but that will not make it so.' Such things as these, but nothing in the way of retaliation.

We have taken a long flight out into the great world and we shall have to do so again, no doubt, in our examination of this subject in all its bearings, but, for the present, let us come back to Newfangle. I think you can all understand this simple principle-that the ownership, and the right and capacity to the management, of anything belongs to him who has made it, so long as he does not put it out of his own possession. Upon this simple principle hangs the whole question of

the right and the capacity to govern Newfangle. Who has made Newfangle? Men or women? When I first set eyes on this township, it was an untouched mass of huge trees, which must be destroyed off the face of the earth before men and women could live on it. The amount of herculean labour which you saw staring you in the face was absolutely appalling. There were no houses, no fields, no fences, no barns, no roads, no bridges, no stock, no implements, no household goods, no schools, no churches, no mills, no money; in short, there was no anything but the ground and the trees which grew on it. The estate was there indeed, but it was most heavily, one might almost have said most hopelessly, encumbered. Look around you to-day. What do you see? Every thing that man or woman could reasonably desire. Comfort, wealth, luxury, refinement, books and pictures, fine clothes, fine houses, fine stores, fine carriages, orchards, gardens, fruit. You see it all. It is plain enough to be seen.

You see men, women and children enjoying it in common. More than two thousand of them, where perhaps a score of wretched savages picked up a half starved existence. How has this wonderful transformation been brought about? Whose brains have thought it, whose hands have done it? Whose money has paid for it? Who have wrought the monstrous labour, enough, we would really think, to have daunted any but heroes? Who have been the choppers, the clearers, the labourers, the mechanics, the masons, the bricklayers, the carpenters, the painters, the tinsmiths, the founders? Who have made the implements, who have built the waggons, and the carriages, and the sleighs, who have shod the horses and cast the stoves ? Who

have dug the canals, built the railways, the steamboats, the wharves, the lighthouses? Whose heads and whose hands have done all these mighty things? Men's or women's?

My dears, you look astonished, as if you were told for the first time, and I dare say you are, facts so plain and evident that those who run may read. Well then, tell me, if men have done all this, who but men can have either the capacity or the right to keep all these things going safely and surely? Who can govern Newfangle but the men. Who have made Newfangle but the men. Set women

to navigate a steamboat, to work a railway. What happens? A blowup, a wreck, a smash. Set women to govern Newfangle. What happens? A blow-up, a wreck, a smash.

'Ah, grandmamma,' you say 'you need not tell us all that. We have never heard it put so plainly before, but the youngest of us can see at once that it is all true. But then women, do you not think, have done their full share. They have done all the household work.'

I expected that, my dears, I am ready for you there. The question is, what is the value of household work, and what does it produce? Could it ever have produced the township of Newfangle? Over what household work produces let women hold absolute sway. Over what men's work produces let men hold absolute sway. Women cook the meals, but men provide them. Women keep the houses clean, neat, and tidy, but men build them. Women live in and enjoy the township of Newfangle, but men have created it. Without men there would be no meals, no houses, no Newfangle. No, no, my dears, I know as much about household work as any woman breathing; I should think I ought to. I know all about it; where it begins and ends; and what it accomplishes. I should be the last to undervalue it. It has all its own value in its own place and degree. But I have also seen and known what men's work accomplishes, and what is the enormous disproportion between its results and the results of women's work. It seems to me scarcely gener

ous or grateful in us women not to acknowledge the immense benefits that we derive from men's work, and I cannot, for my own part, imagine a more delicious feeling than the ample acknowledgment of benefits received, let them come whence they may. It is next to being able to repay them. That we can never do, but let us do what we can. I am simply amazed when I hear these women talk as they do. I wonder where all we women of Newfangle would have been now, if it had rested with women to have built up Newfangle, if the men and women had changed works. No, there is no wonder or doubt about it, I can tell you. In the township of Nowhere. Women might as well have attempted to bring down the sun to boil their kettles, or to build the railway with knitting needles as to have made Newfangle. There would have been no townships, no husbands, no children, 'no nothing.' Take away, to-morrow, the work of men, and Newfangle relapses into the barbarism from which men brought it out. No, no, my dear girls, and thrice no, never let me hear one of you say a word about the rights of women in Newfangle. Deserve all you can, show what capacity you may, but, till you have brought yourselves up even with men, demand nothing. Have too much spirit to do it.

One word more. You will tell me that men could not have done what they have done without the help of women, so that it comes to the same thing. My dears, that is as great a fallacy as all the rest of it.

Men can do without women under conditions which make it necessary or desirable. Without men women perish. Remarkable proofs of both were afforded by our township. A lot of foolish young women, who thought nature a very poor contrivance, and they could amend it, attempted a settlement by themselves, into which no tyrant man should ever enter, and where they would make their own institutions and laws and obey no others. New Vir

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ginia' it was to have been. could come of it? They were found, by mere accident, perishing, by inches, by starvation from cold and hunger, one of their number already dead and lying unburied. Some of our men, on a distant hunting expedition, came upon them, huddled together in a wretched hovel, squalid, unclean, halfclothed, starving, shivering, and shuddering. The men had enough to do to supply their wants as well as their own and it was not without difficulty or danger that they were brought into our settlement. Never, my dears, can I forget the appearance of that mournful procession, as it filed slowly in among us, the men walking in front and carrying the frozen corpse, on a sort of litter, for Christian burial, and some of them, cold as it was, stripped of their coats to cover the poor creature's nakedness; the crestfallen women tottering behind, ashamed to be Righteously ashamed of having ever applied the word tyrant to such men as had rescued them, with every kindness, consideration, and delicacy they said so often enough while their hearts were full; righteously ashamed of ever having thought that the sex to which those men belonged was less pure or noble than their own. And now came the turn of their own sex, of the women of the settlement. They received the poor outcasts with a holy charity. They tended them, fed them, clothed them, nor slackened until the blood was once more seen in their cheeks.

seen.

'When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou!'

We will omit the preceding lines, my dears, for this once at least.

On the other hand, there is the village of Manly. Some men who first settled thereabouts and gave it the name, as foolish as the New Virginia women, only not so helpless, chose, like Colonel Talbot, whom you have all heard of, not to allow a woman within their doors. They got on, to

woman.

all appearance, just as well as Colonel Talbot did. But, if you want that proved among a hundred instances, take a man of war. There are some five hundred souls on board, but no I have read minute descriptions of them. They are the very perfection of method, order, cleanliness; not an inch of the decks but you might eat off; not a bit of metal but you might do your hair by. Captain's table first rate; wardroom table little inferior; men's table all that they require. The men are very handy with the needle.

Well, my dears, if all this that I have been telling you is true of Newfangle, a little out of the way bit of the world, it is a great deal more true -if there are any degrees in truthin the great world beyond. If it would have been impossible for women to have built up such a community as ours, it would have been much more impossible if there are any degrees in impossibility-for them to have built up such communities as exist out in the great world. A fortiori-I have heard men say that, and I know what it means-a fortiori, women have less right to interfere in the public affairs of the great world than here in Newfangle. Just as the work of men there is greater and grander, by so much greater is the disproportion between their work, and its results, and that of women. My dears, I beseech you, let us hear no more of 'rights;' as much indulgence as men choose, but no rights, unless the dictionary is to be turned topsy-turvy.

I have sometimes heard these ladies declaim very bitterly against certain phrases in the marriage ceremony. They cannot abide the idea of being 'given away,' nor of having to promise to obey.' It is to be sure, my dears, generally their own father who does it; still, it is a great indignity to be given away even by him out of his own protection and support into the protection and support of another man. It is extraordinary how little objection

women generally make to the change. As for the obeying, as only those who choose to do so perform their vow, we need not much complain, perhaps, but the indignity is the same, for all that. There is, however, something much worse than either of these affronts, and I marvel that these women should not notice it. I mean 'with all my worldly goods I thee endow.' I greatly marvel that they do not see the degradation of that. Endowed indeed! Not a bit of it! Dollar for dollar on both sides, and no more about it. Why, my dears, do you not see what an enormous disproportion is inflicted upon us poor women here? Take, this township of Newfangle. It contains about 40,000 acres, worth at, say, forty dollars an acre, $1,600,000. Add personal property, say $400,000, together $2,000,000. The interest of this at 6 per cent. is $120,000. I am bad at reckoning, like most women, but I believe that is right. See, then, my dears, what dreadful tales figures tell, and these figures are moderate, within the mark. Now this is Newfangle, and Newfangle, as I have already shown you, belongs to the men who have made it, so that we poor insulted wives of Newfangle are endowed to the tune of $120,000 a year. Unbearable!. strike it out! Let us bring our own $2,000,000 and make it even, or, if we cannot do that, let us give up all the fine things we enjoy, and go back to log-shanties, blue flannel dresses, of our own spinning and dyeing, and ox-sleds for carriages-I know all about that-and be under no such degrading obligation. Come, that would be something like a cry! Something like equal rights! Bella, my love, Jack will be here, this evening. Tell him there are insuperable objections to him. He has a fine farm, a fine house handsomely furnished, a fine carriage, I do not know what all. Why, he must be worth altogether some $8,000 or $9,000, at least, not a cent less. It is out of the question. You can never consent to