It is in the separate schools that the healthy relation vanishes, and the thought of sex becomes a morbid and diseased thing.  This observation first occurred to me when a pupil and a teacher in boys’ boarding-schools years ago:  there was such marked superiority as to sexual refinement in the day-scholars, who saw their sisters and the friends of their sisters every day.  All later experience of our public-school system has confirmed this opinion.  It is because I believe the distinction of sex to be momentous, that I dread to see the sexes educated apart.

The truth of the whole matter is that Nature will have her rights—­ innocently if she can, guiltily if she must; and it is a little amusing that the writer of an ingenious paper on the other side, called “Sex in Politics,” in an able New York journal, puts our case better than I can put it, before he gets through, only that he is then speaking of wealth, not women:  “Anybody who considers seriously what is meant by the conflict between labor and capital, of which we are only just witnessing the beginning, and what is to be done to give money legitimately that influence on legislation which it now exercises illegitimately, must acknowledge at once that the next generation will have a thorny path to travel.”  The italics are my own.  Precisely what this writer wishes to secure for money, we claim for the disfranchised half of the human race,—­ open instead of secret influence; the English tradition instead of the French; women as rulers, not as kings’ mistresses; women as legislators, not merely as lobbyists; women employing in legitimate form that power which they will otherwise illegitimately wield.  This is all our demand.

HOW WILL IT RESULT?

“It would be a great convenience, my hearers,” said old Parson Withington of Newbury, “if the moral of a fable could only be written at the beginning of it, instead of the end.  But it never is.”  Commonly the only thing to be done is to get hold of a few general principles, hold to those, and trust that all will turn out well.  No matter how thoroughly a reform may have been discussed,—­negro emancipation or free-trade, for instance,—­it is a step in the dark at last, and the detailed results never turn out to be precisely according to the programme.

An “esteemed correspondent,” who has written some of the best things yet said in America in behalf of the enfranchisement of woman, writes privately to express some solicitude, since, as she thinks, we are not ready for it yet.  “I am convinced,” she writes, “of the abstract right of women to vote; but all I see of the conduct of the existing women, into whose hands this change would throw the power, inclines me to hope that this power will not be conceded till education shall have prepared a class of women fit to take the responsibilities.”