Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/180

164 friends, and only with the era of complete liberty and justice does the morning of your true being dawn for you.

Powerless and degraded as you have hitherto been, you can attain to power and distinction from the moment that you combine with the correct appreciation of your ends the sincere will to serve them. Your tender hands are a thousandfold able to interfere in the course of events and the actions of men, if you will only put them in the service of your hatred and your love, and if you will hate what is bad and love what is right. You can encourage and deter; you can reward and you can punish; you can twine wreaths and crowns of thorns. If a virgin, cast off your suitor if he does not prove himself a servant of liberty. If a wife, desert your husband if he deserts the cause of liberty. If a mother, rear your children on the milk of liberty, and early enflame in their hearts the hatred for tyranny, that the dagger of Harmodious and Aristogeiton may become the plaything of their youth.

Look about you in Europe! It lies downtrodden beneath the feet of those in whose eyes your entire sex is nothing but a herd of servants and whores, under the feet of those who have had you flogged beneath the gallows on which they had hanged your husbands and sons, What will