into the convents, as into everything human; but we are slow to believe that corruption ever came to pervade and permanently qualify those abodes of the vowed servants of Christ. We do injustice to religion in itself in supposing there is no truth or reality in the profession of moral rectitude. In fact, a large part of the reproachful matter current on this point comes from the pen of M. de Potter, a systematic and inveterate foe of the very institution of Christianity. And his great object in collecting it avowedly was, to serve the cause of irreligion. At any rate, believing or admitting whatever we will of the alleged corruptions of the monastic institution, its beneficial influence on the character and condition of woman at the period when European society settled into its present forms, is a demonstrable fact in the history of Christendom.

Christianity, therefore, proved infinitely efficacious in elevating the character and condition of woman. It began to work out this effect even amid all the corruption of the declining period of the Roman Empire. And its beneficial operation was yet more discernible in the sequel, when it came to cooperate with some remarkable peculiarities in the secular institutions founded by the new masters of Europe. For the barbarians, destructively as they pursued their career of conquest, yet brought along with them the germ of many things which constitute with good reason the boast and pride of modern times. What they did toward the cultivation of woman would suffice to recompense humanity for much of the desolation and misery which, in the long interval between their fierce eruptions from the North and the renovation of civilized life, they inflicted on the European world.

How it was that the feudal system acquired possession of Europe belongs not to the present subject. Suppose it, however, to exist in full vigor, and let us see wherein it affected the condition of woman.

In comparing the political institutions of ancient and modern Europe with other great subdivisions of the human family, we observe that in one an empire is split into fragment states, or smaller states are united in a single empire, by the transmission of sovereignty through the female sex in a manner quite peculiar to Christendom. In the republics of Greece and Rome no such fact occurs. Nor even in the time of the Cæsars and their successors do we find any instance of sovereignty and territorial power annexed to females and transferred from one family to another by marriage. Among the Mohammedans, also, territorial sovereignty belongs only to man. True it is that revenues of particular cities, islands, or provinces are specially appropriated to particular female connections of the Sultan; but these are held not in personal sovereignty, transmissible through the form of marriage in succession, but as a temporary appendage merely; just as, under the Persian Empire, one city furnished the head-dress of the queens, another their slippers, and a third their girdle; * and as the queen-consort in England anciently had queen-gold reserved to her out of the rent of royal domains for specified objects of apparel and maintenance. But the conquerors of Europe introduced laws of inheritance which had the effect either of making a woman a feudal sovereign in her own right, or at least the medium of conveying the feudal rights

*Cicero, Orat. in Verrem, 1. iii., c. 33.

Blackstone's Commentary, vol. i., p. 221.

of her deceased father to the person of her husband. Take the feudal law, for instance, as practiced in England. For some time after the Conquest, dignity and power were annexed to the tenure of lands in the usual condition of feudal service rendered by the holders as liegemen of the king, or vassals of some intermediate chief. He who held lands of the king was a baron of Parliament, the immediate lord of tenants holding in like manner of him, and the qualified sovereign of the territory constituting his fief or fiefs. Some of these fiefs or estates with dignity attached were male fiefs, that is, limited to male heirs of the baron or knight in possession; but others, and those not the least valuable, descended to his heirs generally, females included in default of male heirs. If a baron died, leaving several daughters, either the king selected some one of them, or her husband, to be invested with the feudal dignity; or it remained in abeyance, or suspent, until by the extinction of other branches there was but a single male heir entitled by blood. If there was but one daughter, she became at once a baroness in her own right, and her husband was the possessor and administrator of her feudal power during his lifetime, when it descended to her male heirs, with her nobility and rank, so that her hand conferred or transmitted not wealth only but territorial sovereignty and political distinction.

In some instances, to be sure, these institutions operated hardly upon the affections of a woman, by restricting her freedom of choice in the bestowment of her hand. An heiress was the ward of her feudal superior; and his interest, as the political chief, was to be consulted in the disposition of her person, because involving that of her estates and vassals. The ancient records of the exchequer, says

Edmund Burke, afford many instances where some women purchased by heavy fines the privilege of a single life, some the free choice of a husband, others the liberty of rejecting some one particularly disagreeable. And there are not wanting examples where a woman, having offered a considerable fine to escape marriage with a certain person, the suitor on the other hand has outbid her, and has thus effected his object avowedly against her inclination. Notwithstanding the occurrence of such abuses, the general operation of the feudal law of succession was to augment the importance and respectability of women; for the lord depended very much upon the good will of his vassals; and the particular instances of misrule in question show that woman had at least a will to be consulted and conciliated. And, if herself a great vassal, she exercised a direct personal power in public affairs, which of necessity made her to be feared and regarded. In England, for instance, abbesses attended Parliament in person. Lay peeresses did not appear in person, but they nominated their proxies just like lay peers; and in the Parliament of the 31 Edward III. it appears there were ten peeresses who thus voted by proxy among the great barons. And, previous to the passage of the Reform Bill, females, as proprietors of boroughs, could and did in various cases hold and exercise the right of returning members to the House of Commons.

Such was the principle. And, to comprehend thoroughly its political operation, let us consider it in the cases of great states, rather than in the obscurer examples of subordinate feudal sovereignties. In France, a peculiar text called the Salic law, whose origin is lost in the darkness of the barbarous ages, excluded the female line from the throne; but in

all the other great monarchies of Europe, and even in the feudal subdivisions of France itself, there was no distinction in this respect between the regal and any other dignity. Thus it happened, by the marriage of English princes with French heiresses, that Guienne, Anjou, and other provinces of France became subject to England. Nay, the English long denied the force of the Salic law itself; in pursuance of which Henry V., like his predecessor, Edward III., invaded France, claiming the crown through a female, in preference to a male heir nearly related to the last monarch; and the kings of England, until near to our own day, continued to style themselves kings of France. Thus, in process of time, some of the large French fiefs became vested in the crown. Thus Catalonia was united to Aragon, and Aragon to Castile. And thus the grandson of a Duke of Austria came to be master of the Netherlands, Bohemia, Hungary, Germany, and Spain. To say nothing of women who, like Boadicea of ancient Britain, ascended the throne themselves, and either remained unmarried, as Elizabeth Tudor, and Christina of Sweden, or, if married, yet retained still the government of their hereditary dominions, as Mary Tudor, and Anne Stuart of England, Mary of Scotland, Isabel of Castile, and Maria Theresa of Hungary; at the present time, Spain and Portugal have youthful queens for their sovereigns, and Great Britain will, in all probability, devolve on a princess likewise, through marriage with whom the crowns of each of those countries may pass into a foreign house; just in the same way that a Bourbon originally acquired Spain, and a Guelph inherited Great Britain.

It requires no extended argument to show the efficacy of such laws in imparting personal respectability to woman.