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his goods; such as excludeth the right of the sovereign. A 6th doctrine is this, that the sovereign power may be divided." "There are also that think there may be more sovereigns than one in a commonwealth, and set up a supremacy against the sovereignty; canons against laws; and a ghostly authority against the civil." "Of the Office of the Sovereign representative" (30). "The office of the sovereign, be it a monarch or an assembly, consisteth in the end for which he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely, the procuration of safety of the people. By safety here is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments of life which every man by lawful industry, without danger or hurt to the commonwealth, shall acquire to himself. This should be done, not by care applied to individuals further than their protection from injuries, when they shall complain; but by a general providence contained in public instruction, both of doctrine and example; and in the making and executing of good laws, to which individual persons may apply their own cases." "It belongeth also to the office of the sovereign to make a right application of punishments and rewards." "The sovereign is to choose good counsellors; I mean such whose advice he is to take in the government of the commonwealth." "Every sovereign hath the same right in procuring the safety of his people that any particular man can have in procuring the safety of his own body. Of the kingdom of God, as King of kings, and as King also of a peculiar people, I shall speak in the rest of this discourse." "Of the Kingdom of God by Nature" (31). "There wants only, for the entire knowledge of civil duty, to know what are those laws of God. And seeing the knowledge of all law dependeth on the knowledge of the sovereign power, I shall say something in that which followeth of the kingdom of God." "Whether men will or will not, they must be subject always to divine power. They, therefore, that believe there is a God that governeth the world, and hath given precepts, and propounded rewards and punishments to mankind, are God's subjects; all the rest are to be understood as enemies." "God declareth His laws three ways; by the dictates of natural reason, by revelation, and by the voice of some man, to whom, by the operation of miracles, He procureth credit with the rest. From hence there ariseth a triple word of God-rational, sensible, and prophetic: to which correspondeth a triple hearing; right reason, sense supernatural, and faith. There may be attributed to God a twofold kingdom: natural and prophetic." "The right of afflicting men at his pleasure belongeth naturally to God Almighty; not as Creator and gracious, but as omnipotent." "The divine laws are equity, justice, mercy, humility, and the rest of the moral virtues." "Honour consisteth in the inward thought and opinion of the power and goodness of another; and therefore to honour God is to think as highly of His power and goodness as is possible. And of that opinion, the external signs appearing in the words and actions of men are called worship. "There is a public and a private worship. Public is the worship that a commonwealth performeth as one person. Private is that which a private person exhibiteth. Public, in respect of the whole commonwealth, is free; but in respect of particular men it is not so. Private is in secret free; but in the sight of the multitude it is never without some restraint, either from the laws or from the opinion of men, which is contrary to the nature of liberty." "Seeing a commonwealth is but one person, it ought also to exhibit to God but one worship; which then it doth when it commandeth it to be exhibited by private men publicly.

And this is public worship, the property whereof is to be uniform." "That which is said in Scripture, It is better to obey God than man, hath place in the kingdom of God by pact, and not by nature." "There is no action of man in this life that is not the beginning of so long a chain of consequences as no human providence is high enough to give a man a prospect to the end. And in this chain there are linked together both pleasing and unpleasing events; in such manner as he that will do anything for his pleasure must engage himself to suffer all the pains annexed to it; and these pains are the natural punishments of those actions which are the beginning of more harm than good." "I hope that, one time or other, this writing of mine may fall into a sovereign who will consider it himself (for it is short, and, I think, clear) without the help of any interested or envious interpreter; and by the exercise of entire sovereignty, in protecting the public teaching of it, convert this truth of speculation into the utility of practice."

Thus far proceedeth Part ii. of "Leviathan," which extends in Molesworth's edition to upwards of 200 pages. Brief as our epitome is, we believe that it will be found to contain a fair abstract of the author's opinions, unmixed with any foreign matter. It may be regarded as an analytic index of his opinions, and presents probably as much as any one would be able to remember after a diligent perusal of the original. On a future opportunity we intend to complete our analysis by giving a concise outline of Part iii., which, however, as it occupies upwards of 330 pages, we must very materially if not arbitrarily condense. Meantime we leave our readers to consider the system of "Commonwealth" presented by Hobbes to the subjects of Charles, sovereign de jure, and of Cromwell, sovereign de facto,

in 1651.

SHAKSPERE. "The meagreness of Shakspere's biography, that standing wonder when contrasted with the fulness of the accounts that have come down to us of his less gifted contemporaries, we are inclined to attribute to the evenness of his temperament and the simplicity of his life. If he had been ambitious or eccentric, an innovator or a brawler; if he had believed that his position was inferior to his deserts, and had therefore striven to force himself into notice by hanging on to the skirts of a great man, or by meddling with the political or religious squabbles of the day, there would have been something to tell about him, some striking incidents to record, some failures or successes to chronicle. As it was he left nothing but his plays and his name behind him. All that we know of his history can be told in a dozen words, and we must infer his character from his works, in which he says nothing about himself. He came to London a penniless boy, wrote his dramas and acted in them, lived quietly but joy. ously, amassed a competency, retired to his native place, bought lands, and died an honest and unpretending burgher of Stratford. There was nothing obtrusive in his character or his life, and consequently so little is known of either, that the Wolfs and Heynes of a future generation will probably deny his personality, as they now do that of Homer. But what copious accounts we have of the roisterous, conceited, and quarrelsome Ben Jonson!"-North American Review on Lowell's Poems, April, 1848, p. 464.

Social Economy.

OUGHT THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN TO BE DISCONTINUED?

AFFIRMATIVE ARTICLE.-I.

"THE principle which regulates the existing sccial relations between the two sexes-the legal subordination of one sex to the other-is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on one side, nor disability on the other."-J. S. Mill.

The time has long gone by in which, with even the smallest approach to truth, it could be said

"Man's love is, of man's life, a thing apart;

'Tis woman's whole existence."

Circumstances have entirely changed the fashion of the world. Woman was in its earlier ages a toy and a plaything for man's voluptuous hours, a sport and a ministrant to his passionate delights. Concubinage and bondage were nearly akin, and virile jealousy guarded the objects, not of the love, but the lusts of men, by sequestrated living and concealment. By and by the course and progress of life led to the adoption of the ideas of chivalry, and the exterior forms of respect for women and protection to her chastity were agreed upon. That it should ever have been a point of knighthood to defend female innocence and protect virginity shows how far society had become degraded and debased by confounding the best delights of life with bestiality of practical inter

course.

We know from the books of chivalry that the relations of the sexes were exceedingly vicious, and that the usage to which woman was exposed was singularly vile. Not only rapine, but ravishment were constant consequents of war, and the crimes of rape and outrage were frequent, while the purity of the female sex and the chastity of the male were matters of much scoffing and scurrility. The social condition of women, even in ages nearer to our own time, was a sad one. We learn from our literature, which is, perhaps, even purer than that of any other land, how flagrantly low was the estimate of women entertained by our ancestors. That mirror of each age, the stage, gives the impression that the relations of the sexes were very depraved; and, if we dare credit our early novels, the country was not much less vile than the town in this respect. There is, in regard to all matters relating to sex, no honesty in man nor woman neither, according to the testimony of the stage of Congreve, Vanburgh, and Wycherley, and the novels

of Behn and Fielding-even Richardson's "Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded," is calculated to give a very sorry impression of the purest of those who held their course through the prurient paths of intrigue in which the amusements of genteel life consisted. Women have been alternately the idols and the dupes, the traitresses and the avengers of the moral condition in which the customs of society placed her. Deception was called gallantry, and the vilest stratagems of every sort were had recourse to, that the relations of the sexes should be such as to make women dependent, submissive, and suffering. Even now it is to be feared, from the revelations of our various courts, that social life, though becoming gradually purer, has not by any means attained to that state in which its members could be complimented on being the salt of the earth; or else in a great many instances the salt has lost its savour. The time has come, however, in which the law must step in to equalize the guilt of the sexes, and protect alike from seduction and blandishment, and to do this must equalize the rights of the sexes and the conditions of the sexes, so that no mere subordination shall have place; but that the person, property, good name, prospects, prosperity, and estate of women shall be as carefully and thoroughly protected and defended by the law as those of men. The customs of society, too, must be so re-arranged and settled as to bring the risks and the privileges of both sexes nearer to a par; and the idea of partnership with full rights and equal status shall be granted and given to the, at present, too much subjugated half of humanity.

The ideas of crime and criminality in the sexes must be adjusted on a fairer platform, and the legal protection given to each must no longer be that of prescription, but of justice and equity. Sentiment need not in the least be abolished or weakened by the adjustment of the relations of men and women on such a basis as shall preserve and improve, promote and increase the purity of each.

We affirm, first, that marriage ought to be relation of perfect equality-equality of rights, privileges, responsibilities, and requirements: that there should be no subjection except such as is mutual and in just counterpoise; that there should be a deletion from the form for the Solemnization of Matrimony of the promise compelled from the woman to obey and serve, and a substitution on her part of the same promise only as that to be made by the man, to love, comfort, honour, and keep. Only in this can the trothplight of the married life be just or justified. The woman, by the very fact of the pact, undertakes a most serious and onerous duty -a duty on which the continuance of the world depends. This, of itself, should give her a claim to the favour rather than the tyranny of the law. If she is to undertake "the procreation of children for the family and for the continuance of civil society and of the Church, she ought certainly not to be subjected by the Church and by society to servitude and obedience; rather ought she to be rewarded for her labour of love by the most sure

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protections and most cautious provisions against any slight, hurt, damage, or injury. Being, in fact, so much more bound by nature and the requirements of the family and civil service she undertakes, she ought to have her burden equalized by the husband being weighted with due and requisite covenants to guard and comfort, provide and tend her. Wifehood should be recognised as a relation of family and social equality, but motherhood should be regarded as giving civil and ecclesiastical rights justly proportioned to the burden and the care, the responsibility and the risk. Motherhood ought in all cases to involve the father-putative or real -in proper and just providence for the care of the mother and the security of the child, and any one who flatters, deceives, practices on innocence, or bribes, entices, or procures any one to undertake the risk and responsibility of motherhood without proper guarantees for the care of the mother and the protection of the offspring, ought to be treated as a traitor to society, an enemy to civil life, and receive the reward justly due to a rogue and a vagabond.

To obtain enjoyment under false pretences is much worse than to obtain money under false pretences; to forge on a young spirit the fetters of fornication, and to lay upon a life the burden of the birth and rearing of a child, is worse than to trespass on property, or to engage in the pursuit of game; and no law can be too severe which enforces, in all cases, the proper performance of the duties involved in fatherhood towards both mother and child. It is a scandal to our civilization that the laws of affiliation and marriage should be so basely grounded on the subjection of woman to the pains and penalties of nature, to the unjust laws of marital supremacy, or to the scathe and scorn of the usages of society. The pressure of the law and of social usage is all against the one party, who, by the very doom of nature, is exposed to pain and risk, and is all in favour of the party who is light of foot and vile of conscience. The physical relations of the sexes ought to be settled upon the principles of equity; and if woman is by nature "the weaker vessel," then let her, by the justice of the law, be made strong by the protection it affords; and cause the scandal of the subjection of women to the tyranny of the strong over the weak to cease in our land.

The abolition of the disabilities of women in the married state is urgently demanded. As things are at present, a woman is not mistress of her own person, and cannot refuse to place herself at the disposal of her husband if he chooses to force and enforce his will, wish, or desire-without regard to her pain, distress, dislike, or prudential desire. This is not as it should be; concourse ought to be the result of mutual regard, and not a forced and forcible self-gratification.

Again, the equity of life demands that the personal property of a woman should be at her own disposal, and not, as it is now, usable at the husband's pleasure irrespective of her wishes. The justice of the case demands that free contract alone should be the means

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