Page:The Higher Education of Women.djvu/191

 yoke of that law does man approximate to the brute; and in proportion, on the other hand, as he has escaped from its dominion, is he ascending into the higher sphere of being and claiming relationship with Deity. But the emancipation and due ascendancy of women are not a mere fact: they are the emphatic assertion of a principle; and that principle is the dethronement of the law of force, and the enthronement of other and higher laws in its place, and in its despite.' The advocates of the protective theory seem scarcely to have realised that the idea of protection implies the corresponding idea of attack. It assumes, as part of its essence, that somebody is attacking, or what occasion would there be for defence?