certain works for their masters. If the civilised Christians have understood that to be the position of the one wife; if they have had no higher conception of the marriage relation-it is good for them to behold the full development of their own principle, to see how much more perfectly it may be realised if the form which they have deemed sacred is abandoned. It may be a startling discovery; it may shake all their surface morality. But it may drive them to ask for the ground on which their morality rests; to see whether it has been created by social conventions, or is itself at the very basis of society. Clearly the States by mere force have not been able to put down Mormonism*. Most thankful we should be that they have not. By giving up Slavery, by overthrowing the horrors which it introduced into the marriage relation-horrors with which nothing in the worst records of Polygamy can be compared-they have borne the true witness against Mormonism. Reforming their own civilisation, they have taken the true course for protecting themselves against any attempt, organic or inorganic, to graft the Oriental civilisation upon it. Repenting of the blasphemy which led them to plead the divine authority for making women into far worse than chattels, they have done what they could to vindicate the true Scripture idea, that the man cannot be without the woman nor the woman without the man if there is a Lord in whom they are one. Against every notion of the subjection of women to Force that doctrine has borne, and does bear, the * (1871.) I do not alter this sentence; apparently it is not 'mere force', but law working with a growing discontent in the victims of Mormon tyranny, which is threatening a change in their institutions. The pro test against the Sub jection of women to Force. The marriage union de. termines most weighty testimony. Wherever Christians have adopted that theory of subjection, they may have quoted the Bible glibly in its defence, but they have known in their hearts that they were fighting against the Bible. All civilisation, so far as it has been Christian, has been at war with the doctrine; every return to it has been a relapse into barbarism. But the proclamation of the independence of women is not a counteraction of it-is, I believe, another road to it. That is an attempt to deny the physical order, under pretence of asserting a moral order; it ends in an invasion of one as much as the other. There will be perpetual alternations of slavery on both sides : slavish submission to the attractions of the weak, slavish submission to the force of the strong; until we look upon the relation of Marriage as that which expresses and embodies the principle of the union of the sexes, their tion of the necessary dependence upon each other. No statistics can in the least affect that position. In any given community there may be preponderance of males or females. Thousands of causes may make it the duty of numbers in either to prefer a single life to a married one. But there will be in the single man the habit of reverence, of chivalry, the desire to learn from women what they can teach much better than men; there will be in the single woman the grace and dignity which belongs to the wife; many of the gifts and qualities which are seen in the highest form in the mother; always a willingness to receive from men what they better than women can impart. Every one has seen such approximations to this state of things, such proofs that it is what makes life useful, beautiful, human, that he may well join with M. Comte in the rela sexes to each other. Single life a reflec tion of the married life. exclaiming against boisterous self-assertion on either side as disorderly and injurious. He may join with the same writer likewise in his earnest protest against the licence of Divorce which some European countries have sanctioned, and which Milton-logically I think-connected with his defence of Polygamy. For these services we owe the French Philosopher great thanks, because he is maintaining a very ancient principle which, as he rightly says, the anarchy of our times has disturbed. When he seeks to build the worship of women on a positive foundation, he is maintaining a very ancient practice-one into which men in all ages and under various impulses have fallen; one which has been largely developed in our time; one which may be a needful protest against tendencies to brutalise instead of to deify the female sex; but which will vanish along with them to its great blessing whenever the true order of human life is fully recognised. The idola try of women. Any consideration of the legal status of women, about which we have heard so much in recent controversies, would be manifestly out of place in such a lecture as this. I would however make this remark. The perfect Trust which I have maintained to be implied in the relation of husband and wife, would be wrongly appealed to by those who oppose any measures for protecting the distinct property of women unless they are willing to base all legislation upon this trust. It is Trust of each in the other; it cannot be demanded of one more than of the other. Where the true os prevails, any rules about property will be unnecessary; the cry for rules is an intimation that it does not prevail. The moralist, if he enters into the region of Maxims respecting positive law, must take care that he maintains his own property, and the laws which regulate it, cannot be immediately deduced ground. He affirms the existence of a relation which the Lawgiver can neither establish nor ignore. He does not pronounce what regulations may be needful for the defence of Property where the relation has been forgotten. But if he is silent on this point, he is not from the indifferent to it. Property wants the help of the principles of Domes. Relation, though the Relation can dispense with the tic Moral- Property. When Trust vanishes from the Family, ity. commercial men may feel their need of it—may seek for it eagerly-but they will not find it.* * I would earnestly advise my reader to study a pamphlet “On the Education and Employment of Women," by Mrs. George Butler. He will see how much I am indebted to it; how feebly I have repeated some of the sentiments which are beautifully and powerfully expressed in it. LECTURE IV. (3) BROTHERS AND SISTERS. Relations as if they were not involved in our existence. If I had thought that bright and beautiful pictures of domestic life would enable you best to enter into the subject of my last lecture, I might have found them in our English writers of poetry and prose. I deliberately Danger of left them for such a dark and terrible tragedy as that of treating the Agamemnon. For I would not have you think of relations as if they were-what some seem to consider them the ornaments and embellishments of our existence; additions on the whole, though with many drawbacks, to the sum of its happiness. It is of relations as the core of human society that I speak, as implied not only in its well-being but in its very being. If we do not take account of those societies in which we must exist, we shall attach a very disproportionate value to those in which we may exist. The Class and the Club will be superlatively precious and dear as the Family is lost out of sight. Men will recognise themselves more and more by their badges and colours when they cease to care about the ties of blood. So with all our talk about the greatest happiness of the greatest number, greatest the number to which we attach any real importance means What the number |