WOMEN'S RIGHTS.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 13, Issue 657, 18 February 1869, Page 4

WOMEN'S RIGHTS.

"*' (Blackwood's Magazine.) >lb9. ODowd writes to ask my opinion on the Women's Rights question, and naively informs me at the end of her letter that she has signed the petition to Parliament in favor of that object; a course, I am free to admit, which saves a great deal of trouble to each of us. Not that I affect to say that I would offer anything like resistance, or even remonstrance, on the subject. I would as soon think, if I had a seat in the House, of moving a repeal of the new Reform Act. It is always our fate, in England to have some measure carried outside the Legislature by a general yell, and when to this wild shout of acclamation we can add the shrill voices of our wives and mothers-in-law, the effect is as grand as one of those discords in " Roberto il Diavolo." The ladies have examined the matter ethnologically, aesthetically, morally, analytically, and, I believe, anatomically, and have arrived at the firm conclusion that they are our equals, and something more. Far be it from me to offer a word of dissent to the doctrine. I have been—out of regard to Mrs O'D.'s feelings, 1 won't say how many—years married, and I am ready to declare that it no more occured to me to dispute the supremacy with my wife, to move an amendment to a bill with her name on it, or offer even faint opposition to an opinion declared by her, than I should think of wresting the tiller, out of a steersman's hand in a rocky channel, and assume air the responsi bilities of pilotage in a difficult roadstead. I am in nowise ashamed of this confession. I speak for self and fellows. So say we all of us!—at least all of us who put any value on truth. Use and custom, stronger than all law, have decided this point. We occasionally try to make sorry jests on it, or to laugh at the unhappy confrere who has been made a more conspicuous victim of the system, and we call him henpecked; but in our heart of hearts we know that we have felt the beak ourselves, and that in the matter of top feathers there is not much to boast of I am not going to protest against an ancient and honored practice. On the whole I believe that, like a great many other seeming anomalies, the system has worked well. Many of U 3 carry home from our intercourse with our fellow men a sort of bumptious plethora that needs depletion. We have been successful in this or that conflict: we have won a curt notice from the Saturday Review, or we have carried a motion against Gladstone, or we have out-talked Sergeant Anybody—and these things call for moral blood-let-ting, and they get it! It is only fair to admit that the ladies have used power, on the whole, with a marvelous moderation, and with a skill that shows what amount of study they have given to the perfection of a system that almost raises it to the rank of a science. What an intolerant, self-as-serting, confident, and pretentious set of beings we should have become but for it I dare not stop to consider ! What moral congestions might have occurred but for the use of the alter ative of matrimony there is really no saying; and now, seeing these things, admitting these things, and accepting these things, I would ask, " Is it wise in the women to surrender an unassailable position for a possible and a very doubtful advantage?" Do they believe that if once we admit them to an equality in the wide arena of life we shall go back to accept the mild despotism of their rule at home? I think in this they reckon without their host. It is mainly in the fact that women's lives are not our lives—that their motives, their instincts, their modes of thought and judgment, are not ours, that lies this influence over us. We have no sense of humiliation in yielding to reasons which one of ourselves could not have employed against us. Their quicker susceptibilities, their finer instincts, their greater plasticity, and that subtlety that leaves them in a measure independent of logic, are wonderful weapons for home rule, but would be sorry arms in the coarse conflict of out of door life. They say they want to be lawyers, and doctors, and civil engineers, and members of Parliament; and I have only to reply that a man cannot hold office under the Crown and present himself for adjnission to .the JHouse. A woman cancot preserve that peculiar position she

holds amongst us,.with all its admitted claims to deference and protection, and yet become our competitor and rival. Her sway is not now disputed, and it might satisfy even very high ambitions. We accept the rough work of life very willingly in her behalf, and for nothing more willingly than that it shelters her from those galling accidents, those coarse collisions, and those jarring trials to temper which the rough and tumble existence of a man is filled by. It is however, into this arena she now wants to come down. I will not deny her capacity for the encounter. We live in an age where there are too many and striking proofs of feminine ability abroad to risk such rash assertion. What I demur to is, that women want to come into an overstocked market, while they neglect, as they cannot but do, a natural industry. I doubt greatly if the greediest money maker amongst us wishes to find his wife on his return home, deep in the share list brimful of the price of consols, or speculating for a rise or fall; and lam equally hard of belief that our eagerest politician wants to have the Test Act with his tea, or cares for the compound householder at the domestic hearthrug. I could thoroughly well understand this movement if it were to redress the anomalous condition of women in the humblest ranks of life, whose condition of drudgery is the reproach and shame of our civilisation. Anyone who has seen the poor peasant women in the west or north of Ireland, laboring at the severest of all the toils of husbandry—gathering the seaweed on a storm-lashed shore, and carrying baskets full of it up rocky cliffs, which a Cockney would not face for the bribe of an empire—must have felt that here was a case that cried aloud for reform —here was a woman's right question that could appeal to a larger and wider humanity than fills the a scientific congress with pale-faced philosophers. What think those who correspond with Stuart Mill and read lectures at British Associations of their sisters who work as hod-men, and carry bricks and mortar up steep ladders to the top of lofty buildings ? What say they of one I lately saw harnessed to a plough, with a donkey for her " near sider ?" Methinks there are women's rights to be thought of here far more imminent, far more pressing, and more touching too, than the privileges of old maids to sit in Parliament, or discuss conic sections with Cambridge dons. I believe that the squaws in North America are better off, better treated, their comforts more regarded, and lives made easier to them, than those of a large number of our poor laboring countrywomen ; and if there was to-morrow a woman's light movemet to better their condition, to shield them from hardships from which sex alone should secure them, I am quite ready to join it, even though it should not include the member for Westminster amongst the patrons. 1 have heard very crafty politicians say, when speaking of Greece, "Give them all they ask, and see how soon they'll be sick of it." I have no doubt that this was a measure of the Hellenes ; and I am half disposed to think that there is a great element in the woman's nature which would arrive at very similar results in the present case. It might be a somewhat costly way to resolve the question, I admit, but it would resolve it, and quickly too —to admit women to the competition they aspire to, making them pay the price in all that they should surrender. It I know anything of my fellow men, 1 can declare that they would not look for their wives amongst these prim practitioners, or materia medica women. Ladies may say that they have higher ambitions than to be our helpmates, that their real mission is to be legislators, or judges, or physicians, or at least to share these charges with us. I can only reply that, for my own part, I'd rather not marry a Chancellor of the Exchequer, nor share the domestic hearth with a Bachelor in Medicine. If the women's right question is simply to be the question of unmarried females -—of those who will not, or cannot, marry —let them declare it so. Call it. "The Old Maids' Eeform Association," "The Spinsters' Union," or anything else that would imply that the rights to be acquired, and privileges to be obtained, should not rob us of a wife or mother, or that in making a Professor the more in our community, we had not a true woman the less.

Breakfast.—A Successful Exfebi* ment.-—The Civil Service Gazette has the following interesting remarks :—"There are very few simple articles of food which can boast so many valuable and important dietary properties as coooa. W'hHe.acting on the nerves as a gentle stinlulant, flkprovides the, body with some of the puresf elements of nutrition, and at the same time corrects and the action of the digestive organs. These effects depend in a great measure upon the manner of its preparation, but of late yeays such close attention has been given to the growth and treatment of cocoa, that there is no difficulty in securing it with every useful quality fully developed. The singular succes which Mr Epps attained by his homoeopathic preparation of cocoa has never been surpassed by any experimentalist. Par and wide the reputation of Epp&'s Cocoa has spread by the simple force of its own extraordinary merits Medical men of all shades of opinion have agreed in recommending it as the safest and most beneficial article of diet for persons of weak constitutions. This superiority of a particular mode of preparation over all others is a remarkable proof of the great results to be obtained from little causes. Ey a thorough knowledge of the natural laws which govern the operations of digestion and nutrition, and by a careful application of the fine properties of wellselected cocoa, Mr Epps has provided our breakfast tables with a delicately flavored beverage which may save us many heavy doctors' bills. It is bv the judicious us* of such articles of diet that a constitution may be gradually built up until strong enough to resist every tendency to disease. Hundreds of subtle maladies are floating around us ready to attack wherever there is a weak point. We may escape many a fatal shaft by keeping ourselves well fortified with pure blood and a properly nourished frame." I^s