Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/85

80 wifehood. I have already alluded to the ability of a woman to utterly ruin any man her soul loathes and hates, under precisely the same circumstances; for it lies within her power to make or mar the best man living. I have seen it tried, in both the make and the mar, and with results magnificent in the one case, and insufferably poignant in the other. Thus man, by love all the time, but especially then, can wholly modify woman's character, and kindle her ice to a gentle, constant and invigorant flame. But carelessness and ignorance on the part of many millions of wives, in some sense, make them responsible for their own miseries; for they all have the ability to resist the depleting effects of pestilent vampyrism, and avoid all the diseases, disasters and ailments, mental, moral, physical and emotional, thus engendered; and also to wholly transform the nature and character of almost any man, no matter how coarse, inconsiderate, careless, indifferent or mean.

In declaring these new and weighty truths I victoriously plant the white banner over the frowning ramparts of the social world. Why? How? Attend:—

XLI. Because almost everywhere in this broad land marriage practically exists as a repressive system; it is all head, and the man is that head, while the wife is but an appendage, and by no means either partner or equal; and, so long as such is the case, things will not grow better, because happiness is what every one seeks for, and if not found at the fireside at home will be searched for elsewhere. Now I want to stop all that by showing the law underlying human weal as it has never been shown before on earth. The system of marriage should be one of absolute equality and partnership between couples. I want to help along that system; for the one now in vogue practically drives enormous hosts of people to heaven across lots, over steep-down gulfs of social and domestic horror. I am teaching all to avoid such. On the marriage question, as mainly discussed at present, there is too much everlasting gabble on the horrors of deformity in all parts of the social machine; but I seek to make people purer, nobler, truer, and draw, not drive, them heavenward by appeals to the good, the true, and the beautiful latent