Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/179

163 the essence and dignity of all men have been recognized in purely human conceptions.

Everything that they can be and can wish for depends on these three points: their liberty, their rights, their dignity, their social position, their marital happiness, their love, their education, their everything.

Therefore these three points also suffice as a guide to women for the direction which their antipathies and sympathies, their hate and their love must take. Let all despotism with its supporters, all aristocracy of wealth with its representatives, all religious humbug with its priests, be recommended to the hatred and the abhorrence of the women; let liberty with its champions, socialism with its apostles, reason with its teachers, appeal to the love and sympathy of all women of right thought and noble feeling, whose striving, whose interests, whose happiness, whose future do indeed lie only in the path of these revolutionary motors.

Let them but smile upon you, entice you, flatter you, those brilliant despots, those perfumed slave-holders, those gay soldiers, those suave diplomatists, those proud money-lords, those fawning priests—turn your backs on them, cast them from you with contempt, and swear to them the hatred of destruction, for they are the creators of your slavery, the fathers of your shame, the teachers of your degradation. Only free men are your