Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/223

Rh If the flower is like that, what is to become of the tree?

There have been times when, as one author expresses it, the men had to feel ashamed of themselves before the women. Even such times seem to be past for us. Men who are no longer ashamed of each other will feel no shame before women. Then let us feel ashamed for them. To feel ashamed for you, whom we ought to love, that is the severest punishment that we can conceive of for you; but it is no less severe for us.

It makes me sad, unto apathy, when I see how vainly, how hopelessly every nobler aspiration strives, to merely keep alive the humane qualities, — to say nothing at all of progressive development, — which our German emigration has brought over with it. If these qualities had been lost over there, we could at least console ourselves with the thought that they had been crowded out by the tyranny of power; but here one is tempted to lay the blame upon human, or German nature, when one sees how all this liberty, and all the means for a higher development, are only used to trample upon liberty and development, and to help vulgarity and baseness to triumph. You have never written anything that expressed my own sentiments so completely — as the article on "The Art of Despairing." You have given words to what I have so often thought, but never ventured to say. If it were not for the necessity of expressing yourself freely, and the