Page:A Few Hours in a Far Off Age.djvu/50

Rh if you care to listen, you will find it mostly stupid verbiage they utter. Then they go home and say to their energetically busy wives what men consider smart things about "woman's tongue," "feminine cackle," &c. Men have the audacity to call us deficient in reason! Examine their vaunted ideas! You will laugh till probably tears of sorrowing pity fill your eyes at their constant exposition of their own lack of it. They began all things unreasonably—a round of absurdities and impossibilities for the abasement of the defenceless half of human kind, in the unreasonable imagining that they thereby exalted the other half; and to carry out their unreason they made their god unreasonable!

They call us immoral! Were we one-thousandth part so immoral as they themselves are the world would be worse than any or all things in Dante's hell!

They have so hedged us with the legality of their own immorality, that the most virtuous lady smilingly receives our Solomons and Davids without a misgiving, or thinking how her house is polluted by their presence. But let their victims come to her door, or accidentally brush against her, she would shudderingly spurn them—to further ruin. Her Solomon husband and David friend would at once set about constructing laws for her deliverance from so intolerable an abomination. They would call out the judicial and clerical police to clear the street. Away with the poor creatures to esoteric, shameful, humiliating usefulness! Away with them to some retreat where the Solomons and Davids can find them with least injury to their own sacred persons!

But should the unfortunates leave their allotted boundary—driven, maybe, by fierce hunger for bread—to carry on the vile trade men have forced them into, then, exoteric