Wise men have doubted whether there ought to be separate laws concerning women as such; and scout with reason such phrases as the rights of women and the wrongs of women. I have always had such an intimate conviction of the absurdity of such phrases, that I believe I never used them seriously in my life. In a free country, and a Christian community, a woman has the rights which belong to her as a human being and as a member of the community, and she has no others. I think it a dangerous and a fatal mistake to legislate on the assumption that there are feminine and masculine rights and wrongs, just as I deem it a fatal error in morals to assume that there are masculine and feminine virtues and vices: there are masculine and feminine qualities, wisely and beautifully discriminated, but there are not masculine and feminine virtues and vices. Let us not cheat ourselves by what

outraged, and humiliated, and made to suffer every kind of wrong. Now, all this doubtless arises from the one common feeling that woman is the 'weaker vessel.' As is man's conception of the purposes and uses of strength, so is his treatment of woman either of a defensive or an offensive character. In either case, there is an overweening sense of his own superiority, the practical expression of which, whatever its intent, is degrading to the other sex. We are very far from any disposition to assert that the two extremes of defensiveness and offensiveness are equal evils; it may seem, indeed, to be something of a paradox to place them in the same category; but they are evils which, though differing in degree, arise from the same cause and tend to the same result; both indicate and perpetuate the weakness of woman. To start from one's seat or rush across a room to pick up a woman's pocket-handkerchief, or to open a door for her, is a very different thing from knocking her down and stamping upon her; but both acts originate in the same sense of man's superiority, and tend to perpetuate woman's weakness: the one is a blunder, the other a crime."

I quite agree with the writer that the substitution of flogging for imprisonment, as the more immediate and degrading punishment of the two, however well deserved, would fail in its effect, and that a woman who, under the present law, makes her complaint with extreme reluctance, under a law of retaliation will not make it at all: and she is right. The general impression which exists, that even the women of the lowest grade will not avail themselves of the protection of the law under such conditions, shows us the nature of the creature, though the coarse, the cruel, and the vengeful be found among them. In fact, the remedy lies deeper than law can reach. The writer observes, in conclusion, "What is wanted indeed most of all, is something that will make it less a necessity with women to unite themselves legally or illegally with the other sex. In a large number of cases, what a woman most looks for in matrimony or concubinage is a bread-finder. The example is set by the higher classes, where marriage is looked upon as the end and aim of woman's life. What else, it is said, can she do?"

Mrs. Malaprop would call "a nice derangement of epithets," lest" a nice derangement" of morals ensue thereupon; lest our ideas get hopelessly entangled in words, and our principles of right and wrong become mystified by sentimental phrases.

Nothing in all my experience of life has so shocked me, as the low moral standard of one sex for the other, arising, as I believe, out of this irreligious mistake. I see, among the women of our higher classes, those who have lived much in the world as it is called, a sort of mysterious horror of the immorality of men, not as a thing to be resisted or resented or remedied, but to be submitted to as a sort of fatality and necessity (for so it has been instilled into them) or guarded against by a mere inefficient barricade of conventional proprieties; while I see in men of the world a contemptuous mistrust of women, an impression of their faithlessness, heartlessness, feebleness, equally fatal and mistaken. Men are not all sensual and selfish; women are not all false and feeble. Women, I am sorry to say it, can be sensual and selfish; men can be false and weak; but then I have known men, manly men, with all the tenderness and refinement we attribute to women, and I have known women who have united with all their own soft sympathies and acute perceptions, quite a manly strength and sincerity. The union is rare; it brings the individual so endowed near to our ideal of human perfection; it is what we ought to aim at in all our schemes of education. Meantime, let us have what is the next best thing, the combination of the two natures, the two influences in all that we are trying to effect for the good of the "human family."

I return to the so-called "rights and wrongs of women only to dismiss them at once from our thoughts and our subject. Morally a woman has a right to the free and entire development of every faculty which God has given her to be improved and used to His honour. Socially she has a right to the protection of equal laws; the right to labour with her hands the thing that is good; to select the kind of labour which is in harmony with her condition and her powers; to exist, if need be, by her labour, or to profit others by it if she choose. These are her rights, not more nor less than the rights of the man. Let us therefore

put aside all futile and unreal distinctions. I go back to the principle laid down in my former Lecture, and I appeal against human laws and customs to the eternal and immutable law of God. When He created all living creatures male and female, was it not His will that out of this very disparity in unity, this likeness in unlikeness, there should spring an indissoluble bond of mutual attraction and mutual dependence, increasing in degree and durability with every advance of sentient life? And when He raised us, His human creatures, above mere animal existence, did He not make the union, by choice and will, of the man and the woman the basis of all domestic life? all domestic life the basis of all social life? all social life the basis of all national life? How, then, shall our social and national life be pure and holy, and well ordered before God and man, if the domestic affections and duties be not carried out, and expanded, and perfected in the larger social sphere, and in the same spirit of mutual reverence, trust, and kindness which we demand in the primitive relation? It appears to me that when the Creator endowed the two halves of the human race with ever-aspiring hopes, with ever-widening sympathies, with ever-progressive capacities, when He made them equal in the responsibilities which bind the conscience and in the temptations which mislead the will,— He linked them inseparably in an ever-extending sphere of duties, and an ever-expanding communion of affections; thus, in one simple, holy, and beautiful ordinance, binding up at once the continuation of the species and its moral, social, and physical progress, through all time.

Let these premises be granted, and hence it follows as a first natural and necessary result, and one which the wisest philosophers have admitted, that the relative position of the man and the woman in any community is invariably to be taken as a test of the degree of civilisation and wellbeing in that community. Hence, as a second result equally natural and necessary, we find that all that extends and multiplies the innocent relations, the kindly sympathies, the mutual services of men and women, must lead to the happiness and improvement of both. Hence, thirdly, if either men or women arrogate to themselves exclusively any of the social work or social privileges which can be performed or exercised perfectly only in communion, they

will inevitably fail in their objects, and end probably in corrupting each other. Hence, in conclusion, this last inevitable result; that wherever the nature of either man or woman is considered as self-dependent or self-sufficing, their rights and wrongs as distinct, their interests as opposed or even capable of separation, there we find cruel and unjust laws, discord and confusion entering into all the forms of domestic and social life, and the element of decay in all our institutions. In the midst of our apparent material prosperity, let some curious or courageous hand lift up but a corner of that embroidered pall which the superficial refinement of our privileged and prosperous classes has thrown over society, and how we recoil from the revelation of what lies seething and festering beneath! How we are startled by glimpses of hidden pain, and covert vice, and horrible wrongs done and suffered! Then come strange trials before our tribunals, polluting the public mind. Then are great blue books piled up before Parliament, filled with reports of inspectors and committees. Then eloquent newspaper articles are let off like rockets into an abyss, just to show the darkness-and expire. Then have we fitful, clamorous bursts of popular indignation and remorse; hasty partial remedies for antiquated mischiefs; clumsy tinkering of barbarous and inadequate laws; then the vain attempt to solder together undeniable truths and admitted falsehoods into some brittle, plausible compromise; then at last the slowly awakening sense of a great want aching deep down at the heart of society, throbbing upwards and outwards with a quicker and a quicker pulse; and then what then? What if this great want, this something which we crave and seek, be in a manner a part of ourselves? --lying so near to us, so close at our feet, that we have overlooked and lost it in reaching after the distant, the difficult, the impracticable?

THE COMMUNION OF LABOUR IN SANITARY, EDUCATIONAL, REFORMATORY, AND PENAL INSTITUTIONS.

WORK in some form or other is the appointed lot of alldivinely appointed; and, given as equal the religious responsibilities of the two sexes, might we not, in distributing

the work to be done in this world, combine and use in more equal proportion the working faculties of men and women, and so find a remedy for many of those mistakes which have vitiated some of our noblest educational and charitable institutions? Is it not possible that in the apportioning of the work we may have too far sundered what in God's creation never can be sundered without pain and mischief, the masculine and the feminine influences? lost the true balance between the element of power and the element of love? and trusted too much to mere mechanical means for carrying out high religious and moral purposes?

It seems indisputable that the mutual influence of the two sexes- brain upon brain - life life upon becomes more subtle, and spiritual, and complex, more active and more intense, in proportion as the whole human race is improved and developed. The physiologist knows this well: let the moralist give heed to it, lest in becoming more intense, and active, and extended, such influences become at the same time less beneficent, less healthful, and less manageable.

It appears to me that we do wrong to legislate, and educate, and build up institutions without taking cognisance of this law of our being. It appears to me that the domestic affections and the domestic duties — what I have called the "communion of love and the communion of labour "must be taken as the basis of all the more complicate social relations, and that the family sympathies must be carried out and developed in all the forms and duties of social existence, before we can have a prosperous, healthy, happy, and truly Christian community. Yes!I have the deepest conviction, founded not merely on my own experience and observation, but on the testimony of some of the wisest and best men among us, that to enlarge the working sphere of woman to the measure of her faculties, to give her a more practical and authorised share in all social arrangements which have for their object the amelioration of evil and suffering, is to elevate her in the social scale; and that whatever renders womanhood respected and respectable in the estimation of the people tends to humanise and refine the people.

It is surely an anomaly that, while women are divided

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