Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/112

108 what poverty, what ignorance, what beastliness of man and woman too! The Christian civilization of the nineteenth century is well summed up in London and New York—the two foci of the Anglo-Saxon tribe, which control the shape of the world's commercial ellipse. Look at he riches and the misery; at the “religious enterprise” and the heathen darkness; at the virtue, the decorum, and the beauty of woman well-born and well-bred, and at the wild sea of prostitution, which swells and breaks and dashes against the bulwarks of society; every ripple was a woman once!

O, brother men, who make these things, is this a pleasant sight? Does your literature complain of it, of the waste of human life, the slaughter of human souls, the butchery of women? British literature begins to wail in “Nicholas Nickleby,” and “Jane Eyre,” and “Mary Barton,” and “Alton Locke,” in many a “Song of the Shirt;” but the respectable literature of America is deaf as a cent to the outcry of humanity expiring in agonies. It is busy with California, or the Presidency, or extolling iniquity in high places, or flattering the vulgar vanity which buys its dross for gold. It cannot even imitate the philanthropy of English letters: it is “up” for California and a market. Does not the Church speak? the English Church, with its millions of money, the American, with its millions of men, both want to bay the moon of foreign heathenism. The Church is a dumb dog, that cannot bark, sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber. It is a Church without woman, believing in a male and jealous God, and rejoicing in a boundless, endless hell!

Hitherto, with woman, circumstances have hindered the development of intellectual power in all its forms. She has not knowledge, has not ideas or practical skill to equal the force of man. But circumstances have favoured the development of pure and lofty emotion in advance of man. She has moral feeling, affectional feeling, religious feeling, far in advance of man; her moral, affectional, and religious intuitions are deeper and more trustworthy than his. Here she is eminent, as he is in knowledge, in ideas, in administrative skill.

I think man will always lead in affairs of intellect—of reason, imagination, understanding,—he has the bigger