Page:A Few Hours in a Far Off Age.djvu/42

Rh power of thought—which is the heritage of all. Later still, men quietly ignored whatever woman did to prove her mental equality, but, at the same time, indefatigably kept before public eyes any intellectual achievement by one of their own sex: and considered they efficiently proved their own superiority when they told her she was inferior. Men of some mental power, but very deficient in integrity, fouled their pens by writing defamatory or fatuous articles scorning woman's righteous appeal for her share in legislation for human kind—which writings, like other unclean things, defiled all who placed credence in them. Those who had most to fear from her discovery of their malpractices went so far as to assert that woman was too deficient in morality and conscientiousness for sharing in the government of the world."

The elder son, reflectively:

"From brutes one ought not to be astonished at meeting with brutality—but in my thought of the unhappy past what so perplexes me is that men who possessed some intellect should have been so obtuse as to keep women in that disastrous state of slavish oppression. Why, even the rude mechanical knowledge they possessed was sufficient to have taught them that no whole can be perfect when only half is cared for; and that it matters not bow beautifully such half be polished and cherished—if to the neglect of the other, the ruin of the entirety must follow."

Looking very affectionately at her noble boy, she replies:

"Your quick perception and apt definition always reward me for the pain of going over the sad past. You are right, dear, the ruin did come, repeatedly. Nation after nation fell. Whole races dwindled in intellect, and sunk irretrievably. Some historians assigned one cause—some, widely