Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/356

340 their slavery to the liberty of which they never had had any conception. Women who oppose their emancipation belong to the same class, but are just as exceptional in civilized countries as the negroes and prisoners just mentioned. We may therefore rest assured that the opposition we have to face comes from the men. Although I can very well understand this opposition, I am nevertheless tempted to exclaim: "Forgive them, they know not what they do." Indeed, they are not aware of the vulgarity they evince by denying us that which they unhesitatingly grant to the most degraded of their own sex; they do not know how they expose their intellectual and moral deficiencies when they betray and deny all the principles and arguments in our case, which they promulgate and emphasize in their own; and finally they do not know that it is treachery to themselves to prevent us from doing our share towards ennobling and humanizing their own lives.

What I am here saying holds good especially of German men, for the Americans have outstripped them in this question by half a century. When do you ever hear an American dispose of woman's rights by such vulgar witticisms as are customary among the German spokesmen of their sex? And, if our local legislatures were constituted of Germans, how long would we still have to wait until such important minorities would appear in behalf of our emancipation, as have already appeared in several Western legislatures? But the majority of our