Lady Amberley has been lecturing for an hour-and-a-half at the
Stroud Institute on the rights of women, but she does not seem to have said much that was forcible on the subject. She seems to have admitted that women are indifferent to the fran- chise, and to have reproached them for it. She urged the very singular argument that the Queen does not cease to be feminine through the use of her acknowledged political prerogative,—as if any one had ever supposed that the study of politics and the use of political influence make a woman unfeminine. We rather wish Lady Amberley would have told us whether she does or does not admit that there is such a creature as an unfeminine woman, and if so, in what the defect consists. Would she not have been obliged to admit that it is in a certain combativeness of in- stinct to which all habitual use of hard power, as distinguished from intellectual influence, is apt to lead, and which the Queen herself never wields ? Lady Amberley and her friends are apt to talk as if there were no such defect as effeminacy in man, and. masculineness in woman.
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