IV.

Mr. Goldwin Smith on Women Rulers.

"Mr. Mill had persuaded himself that great capacity for government had been displayed by page 72 women, and that there was urgent necessity for bringing them into the management of the State. But he can hardly be serious when he cites as an instance of female rule a constitutional queen whose excellence consists in never doing any act of government except under the guidance of her ministers. The queens regnant or consort, before our monarchy became constitutional, who may be said to have wielded power, are the Empress-Queen Matilda, Eleanor the wife of Henry II., Isabella the wife of Edward II., Margaret of Anjou, Mary, Elizabeth, and Henrietta Maria. Not much can be made of this list, when it is considered that both Margaret of Anjou and Henrietta Maria were, by their temper, principal causes of civil war, and that the statesmanship of Elizabeth has totally collapsed between Mr. Froude's first volume and his last, while her feminine relations with Leicester and other favourites have contracted a much more ominous complexion in a political as well as in a moral point of view. On the other hand, it is probable that Eleanor the wife of Edward I., and certain that Caroline the wife of George II., rendered, in a womanly way, high services to the State. Mr. Mill says, from his experience at the India Office, that the queens in India are better than the kings. But the reason is obvious. British protection has suspended the operation of the rude checks on the vices of Indian despots, and a woman brought up in the zenana, though she cannot possibly be a good ruler, may well be better than a hog or a tiger.

Neither the cases of queens, however, nor those of female regents of the Netherlands, to which Mr. Mill gives so strange a turn (as though Charles V. and Philip II. had preferred females on account of their ability to male members of the house), are in point. They all belong to the hereditary system, under which these ladies were called to power by birth or appointment, and surrounded by counsellors from whose policy it is scarcely possible to distinguish that of the sovereign.

Female Sovereigns, as a rule, have not been eminently pacific. It would be difficult to find four contemporary male rulers who made more wars than Catherine the Second of Russia, Maria Theresa, Madame de Pompadour (who ruled Prance in the name of her lover), and the Termagant, as Carlyle calls her, of Spain. It is widely believed that the late Empress of the French, inspired by her Jesuits, was a principal mover in the attack on Germany. Those who know the Southern States say that the women there are far more ready to renew the civil war than the men. The most effective check on war is, to use the American phrase, that everyone should do his own fighting. But this check cannot be applied to women, who will be comparatively irresponsible in voting for war. A woman, in fact, can never be a full citizen in countries where, as in Germany, it is part of a citizen's duty to bear arms."

Macmillan's Magazine, June 1874.