Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/169

 woman!" thus deliberately insulting, in their very house of worship, the sex of their mothers!

But from the earliest times, if we are to accept historical testimony, the Jews of the ancient world appear to have treated women in the majority as "Something worser than their dog, a little lower than their horse." Save and except those rare cases where the Jewish woman suddenly found out her latent powers and employed them to advantage, the Jewish man made her fetch and carry for him like a veritable beast of burden. He yoked her to his plough with oxen,—he sold and exchanged her with his friends as freely as any other article of commerce,—his "base uses" of her were various, and seldom to his credit,—while, such as they were, they only lasted so long as they satisfied his immediate humour. When done with, she was "cast out." The kind of "casting out" to which she was subjected is not always explained. But it may be taken for granted that in many instances she was either killed immediately, or turned adrift to die of starvation and weariness. The Jews in their Biblical days were evidently not much affected by her griefs. They were God's "chosen" people,—and the fact that women were the mothers of the whole "chosen" race, appeared to call for no claim on their chivalrous tenderness or consideration.

Looking back through the vista of time to that fabled Eden, when she listened to the tempting of the "subtil" one, the wrongs and injustices endured by Accursëd Eve at the hand of Coward Adam make up a calendar of appalling, almost superhuman crime. Man has taken the full licence allowed him by the old Genesis story (which, by the