Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/188

172 preponderance made completely the master of the dependent poor? There is no more monstrous arrogance than to grant to property over and above the advantages it already confers also the privilege of authority, a privilege to which, ‘if it were ever justifiable, only the deepest insight and the most disinterested concern for the general welfare could grant a claim.

"The dangers which are predicted by the opponents of equal rights are only imaginary, and inthe course of time will disappear of themselves. The power of incapacity decreases with increased opportunity to test itself; and where, as a result of former neglect, it causes the State temporary embarrassments, the latter has to overcome them by a proper expiation of its own guilt. The State is as little exempt as the individual from the necessity of either atoning for former mistakes by righting them, or of multiplying them to work its own ruin. The negro slaves had placed this country before such an alternative, and it decided itself for the saving expedient in the eleventh hour. After justice had been done to the negroes, at least as far as form is concerned, the women knocked at the doors of the Capitol. We too, they say, are human beings and are called citizens; we too are a part of the people, and not its worst part; we too want to have a part in the associated business which is called State. You speak of democracy and exclude one half of society from it, in order