Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/357

Rh German men, however ostentatiously they flaunt the flag of "radicalism," cannot yet quite divest themselves of the spirit of servility. Descended from a country where the degradation of both men and women was systematically conducted by three dozen courts, through a million agents of vulgarity, throughout every stratum of society, where, naturally, the stronger of the oppressed found a sort of consolation or diversion in the assumption of superiority over the weaker of the oppressed — somewhat after the manner the "Democratic" party slaves in this country deported themselves as a sort of lord over the negro slaves — and where the contempt for women as subordinate beings created only for the service and lust of men was bred into them from childhood in an infected moral atmosphere, although now emancipated from their prince, these one-time subjects cannot yet emancipate themselves from themselves, and while they, as superior minds, dictate our "sphere" to us, they are not aware that it is only the degenerate spirit of the creature of royalty, the student, the musketeer, the philistine, that asserts itself in: them. In the officer's clubs, the beer-houses, the guard-rooms, and the students' inns on the other side of the water the question of woman's rights is probably treated in exactly the same manner as here by the German newspaper writers, and popular leaders.

I regret this, I am ashamed of it, for the sake of the German name, which is boasted of so much,