Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/240

224 the revolution with universal suffrage without first providing for the removal of the reactionary candidates, and the enlightenment of the ignorant voters. Nevertheless, after the harm has once been done, it will certainly all come out right in the end. It is no misfortune for a child to stumble, if thereby it learns to walk; neither is walking ever forbidden to a child for that reason.

But we women must not learn to walk until we are grown up, and I can not, for the life of me, see the advantage of this tender regard. To postpone the beginning, when it is a matter of necessity, can never lead to reasonable results. No man can maintain that the emancipation of woman, the placing her on a footing of complete legal equality with man, can be evaded in practice, since it is impregnable in principle. Why, then, this procrastination? The moral of the Sibylline books would hold good here, too. Men have not learned how to exercise their rights in a day; women will learn it no sooner than they did. But they must make a beginning sometime, and it is a sad thing to see how this beginning, which has so many obstacles to overcome, anyway, is attacked, a priori, with the most trivial weapons of scorn and animosity, by those who have nothing to say against the principle. In order to postpone the term for the emancipation of woman so long as possible, this coarse and aggressive state of society certainly does not need the aid of men, who have devoted their lives to the conquest of brutality and aggression!