Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/219

Rh a woman? To lighten a man's purse by a breach of trust is to you a crime; but to poison a heart by a breach of trust is to you a pastime. How many are there among you who would shrink from writing a list of their Don Juan triumphs, with the bloody tears of unhappy women? Have you not been accustomed, I might almost say trained from» early youth, to press women into the service of your low aims, by every means you like, regardless of con-. sequences, and even to boast of their misfortune? Do you not regard a girl, whom you have started on the road to shame, or driven to suicide from despair, as the hunter regards the game he has wounded or slain? But afterward you are all ready to sing:

"Honor to woman! To her it is given

To garden the earth with the roses of heaven!"

It is like hearing a hunter sing: "Honor to game,

for it tastes good, when we have killed it."

What a revolution will yet have to take place, in the conceptions of men; what a change education will have to work in their lives, before they can attain to a knowledge and recognition of the most rudimentary principles of honor, and morality, as concerns their relationship to. weak woman, chained with a thousand fetters of dependency to man-made conditions! If you do not yet wish, or are not yet able, to grant woman equal rights in public life, you can ‘at least accustom yourself, in social life, not to degrade her by a morality, which, among yourselves,