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Untitled Article
partially ? Even science , at the one extreme , and poetry at the other , are not Ihe same thing to the royal expectant that they are to others . Every topic of thought is referable in some way or other to the great , the all-pervading distinction . She travels over geometry itself by a royal road ; skims the sciences as their future patroness ; regards all the lighter and brighter emanations of
intelligence as the adornments of her future court ; and in religion and morality beholds the sanctions of her authority . The prejudices and perversions which it is the tendency of her situation to produce , have already been generated in the race to which she belongs , and so transmitted to her ; while they are also cherished by almost all who are admitted to her presence . History shows
that , whether male or female , those whose conduct has proved them the best qualified to use royal power beneficially have rarely indeed been educated in the expectation of its possession . The non-expectancy was fortunate , both for themselves and their subjects . A royal education is , comparatively , a disadvantage . A wordan brought up as the heiress of queenly dignity is less likely to have her character finely and fully developed than as if she had been simply a respectable gentlewoman .
It is not strange that the egregious anomaly should have been felt of institutions which sometimes invest woman , educated in very unfavourable circumstances , with the state and amplitude of supreme political authority ; and which , nevertheless , uniformly deny to woman , though trained in the most favourable circumstances , the exercise of the very lowest and simplest political function , that which is essential to political existence , the elective franchise . In the common opinion of common statesmen , the fitness of woman to vote for an individual's elevation to the
temporary dignity of a legislator in the House of Commons , is a mere joke : yet her naming scores of persons legislators for life , and all their heirs legislators too , through all generations , is an essential portion of that perfection of ancestral wisdom under which we live . She is vested with the entire power of the State , or not entrusted with its meanest fraction . She is a divinity or a slave . In truth this mystery is hard to swallow , and warily must a loyal subject steer his course so as neither to be convicted of
constructive treason by the Tories , nor ridiculed , even by radicals , for the extravagance of his theories . Sundry aggravations of the discrepancy are scattered about society , with that beautiful contempt of uniformity which the Reform Bill so happily copies from our older institutions , in order
that the constitution may not go to total wreck and ruin . There are sundry little clubs and dignities , about the country , in selecting for which a woman ' s judgment , if she possess property , may be legitimately exercised . She may have her portion of parochial representation in the vestry . She is perfectly competent to pronounce on the skill of a physician who may save or sacrifice life ,
Untitled Article
638 A Political and Social Anomaly .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1832, page 638, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1820/page/62/
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