The share which women have hitherto been permitted to take in the public affairs of nations has singularly oscillated. Our sex always seems to be in the zenith or at the nadir; on the throne or nowhere; at the goal or out of the running. There have been two or three dozen great female rulers in universal history, and the proportion of able and prosperous sovereigns among them, compared to the proportion of similarly able and prosperous Monarchs among the many hundreds of kings, is a most astonishing fact. Semiramis, Nitocris, Artemisia, Deborah, Zenobia, Cleopatra, Boadicea, Elizabeth, Isabella of Castile, Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Anne and Victoria—many of these women, semi-fabulous or historical, virtuous or vicious, were yet, to all seeming, so gifted with the special governing faculty that they have each made an epoch in history; while France, the only country in Europe which has held to the Salic law and refused to admit a lawful Queen Regnant, has been punished by Nemesis in the shape of a score of female harpies, Diane de Poitiers, Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barry, et hoc genus omne.

Mr. Mill says that when he was at the India House he observed that whenever a province in India was particularly well governed by a native prince, he found, in three cases out of four, that it was some woman, some Begum or Ranee who had emerged from the Zenana to wield the sceptre with a vigour and good sense rarely paralleled among the Rajahs.