Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/221

Rh it. Threefold happy is the woman who, in these times of general enervation and vulgarity, has found a man whom she can truly respect and love! Let no one accuse me of not making due allowance for the exceptions; I know them and know how to appreciate them doubly. But what, I ask, is one to think of that ruling mass and its prominent personages, among whom genuine men are regarded as proscribed and leprous beings? Has it any other aim than money-making, animal pleasures, and political degradation? What has become of that large emigration which once filled our fatherland with the battle-cry against tyrants? Are those men who forgot liberty as soon as it was vanquished? Are those men who, on the other side of the sea, swore eternal hatred against tyranny, and in this country are so lost to shame that they unite with the owners of human beings for the purpose of undermining the republic? I know the weaknesses of my sex, and admit them, although it is not itself responsible for the most of them; but so much I can maintain — no woman whose heart has once been stirred with enthusiasm for liberty is capable of forgetting it over night, or of becoming reconciled with its opposite, for any low considerations. We are true to ideas as we are to persons. But, you men can forget and betray everything for which you once seemed to glow, not singly, not by tens and dozens, not only a hundred fold; thousands and thousands of you turn your backs upon liberty, cast your ballot for