Page:A Few Hours in a Far Off Age.djvu/9

10 that to tell you concerning your progenitors which to your brave mind will appear cowardly and debasing; but when you shall have learned to dissect these truths with the calm judgment arising from more philosophical thought, you will perceive that all that primitive wrong-doing was entirely from the vanity and prejudice born of ignorance. It would be unjust and unreasonable were I to feel anger or contempt for my loved son because his thought is immature. So with those other children—those still more imperfect beings of a younger world—living under the all-powerful, though by them unseen, law of evolution. Ought we to be indignant with them because they had not the great benevolence which springs only from the knowledge of numerous ages? and because, being nearer the brute, they naturally showed more traces of their origin? Grasp that, and you will not be surprised to learn that the males of these primitive people held their own sex in such veneration that quite young ones—puny in intellect, and without education—were, by act of senate, qualified to elect senators, enter upon the government of the world, and occupy the highest offices to the exclusion of the Infinite Intelligence, where possessed by women. So those poor vain creatures, with much assumption of wisdom, though still very apelike in various ways, made laws affecting woman's liberty, property, and even her children, without consulting her, her happiness, or any higher feeling than their own self-love, comfort and aboriginal greed. In short, the women up to past the nineteenth century were really slaves in all but the name. It is known that men long retained much of brute strength, gained in the still earlier ages by fierce combats for possession of women to toil for them; and they sedulously preserved all they could of that great muscular power,