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    bribe but for their wives . There is nothing , then , in English wonflen that should prevent their comprehension of the nobleness of political honesty ; it is only the great ladies , and their imitators , who think self-interest the sole principle of public conduct . Why is this ?

    because all women are proud ; station incites their pride . The great man rats , and is greater than ever ; but the poor elector who turns his coat loses his station altogether . The higher classes do not imagine there is a public opinion among the poor . In many boroughs a man maybe bribed , and no disgrace to him ; but it after being bribed , he break his word , he is cut by his friends for ever .

    ' A very handsome girl had refused many better offers for the sake of a young man , a scot and lot voter in a certain borough . Her lover , having promised in her hearing to vote one way , voted another . She refused to marry him . Could this have happened in the higher classes ? Fancy , my dear , how the great would laugh ; and what a good story it would be at the clubs , if a young lady just going to be married were to say to her suitor one bright morning , " No , sir , excuse me ; the connexion must be broken off . Your vote in the House of Commons last night was decidedly against your professions to your constituents . "' —vol . i . pp . 144 , 145 . There is further illustration of the debasing influence of aristocracy on female conversation and character at p . 160 . In fact nothing in civilized life can be half so blighting to all that is pure , noble , and beautiful in woman . It leaves not even the aspiration

    after greater independence and elevation of thought and action . Women , especially of the higher classes , would be the bitterest enemies of any woman who should dream of raising her own sex to its proper position . They are reduced so far as to prefer remaining creatures of frivolity and sense to that expansion of

    sympathy and intelligence , which might indeed repel the gilded flies that now their cobwebs are spread to catch , but which would make them the friends , advisers , and rewarders of high-minded men . And their degradation , with the kind of feeling which it may be said rather to cherish than merely not to suppress , entails a yet more bitter lot on those thousands of their sex , of inferior station , who are sacrificed as the victims of seduction from year to year . The young and idle portion of the aristocracy is the chief agency of this atrocious and loathsome work . It is with them as good a

    joke as that which old yEsop tells of the boys and the frogs in the fable . There is as much zest on the one side , and-suffering on the other . For the continuance of this evil , the ladies of England ought to be told that they are to some extent responsible . They might make those who approached them feel that there are offences which are neither to be forgiven nor forgotten . They might at least as much disdain the society of one convicted of notorious profligacy as they do that of one convicted of being a tradesman . Such discrimination and rigidity are however beyond hope , until a thorough reform is achieved of female education . And tvhen can we expect that reform , so long as the being on

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    596 Characteristics of English A ristocracy .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1833, page 596, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2622/page/12/