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Untitled Article
William Howitt says , that we are not to judge a character by the occasional extravagance of a mind under strong excitement ; that c Boyle , the philosopher , had great faith in the marrow of the thigh-bone of a hanged man , for the cure of certain complaints ; and left the recipe among his papers : ' that , ' Bacon ,
notwithstanding the wonderful advance of his mind beyond the mind of his own age , held some notions nearly as absurd : but who measures these great men by their foibles ? It would be easy to brin g a ludicrous list of extrava gances , follies , and eccentricities ^ committed by three-fourths of our martyrs and reformers ; but it would be an invidious task . We have better things to estimate them by . '
When is this tone of thought and feeling adopted in considering the character and actions of women ? On that subject recourse is ever had to old stock notions and assertions , which are as suitable to the theme now as the old stock suits of the performers of past ages would be to the histrionic brotherhood of the present day . The head and front of the offence ( to me ) of the paper on * Women of Business , ' consists in this assertion :
' That women are not capable of that self-abstraction—that concentration of the powers of the mind—that calm deliberate sobriety of conternplativeness , indispensable to statesmanship . With them the passions and the faculties are inextricably mingled in mutual reaction . Their moral , no less than their physical organization , interdicts their interference in the mighty strife of political warfare . '
The cloven foot of the narrow politician appears in this paragraph , which the after allusion to Lord Durham makes yet more intelligible . The changes which are circulating with the vital currents of this country will mount upwards to the throne ; but that will not be till a young branch waves its green honours there . Though no idolater of royalty , glad shall I be to see the day when I may bend in heart homage to the ' anointed head' of
one who loves humanity—who looks upon a people with a wish to do much for them , not to make the most of them . So long as thrones be necessary , blest will be the lands which see them filled by such as rise to them in the spirit of the age in which they live , (and of the people they are appointed to govern . As for political strife / I hope that , like the strife of war , is passing away ; and that the irrational spirit amon g men , which necessitated the exclusion of women , is yielding to the rational spirit which will admit their co-operation . Of old , cobalt was thrown aside by miners as useless : they regarded it as such an annoyance when found among the ores , that there was a prayer used in the German church , that God would preserve miners from cgbalt and evil spirits . The oxide of cobalt forms the most permanent blue colour with which we are acquainted ; and the
Untitled Article
Quaker Women . 81
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1835, page 31, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2641/page/31/
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