Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/386

370 to a man, to receive his name from his beard instead of from his head. And yet Frederick the Red-Beard has become the German ideal of a ruler. Barbarossa would surely not have become such a popular figure if he had not had such a large red beard, and his present substitute, ad interim, in Berlin, has already been dubbed Barba blanca by German professors, in order to increase his popularity. Ifhis beard were likewise red, half of the populatron of Germany would now be inmates of the insane asylum, from sheer red-haired ecstacy, and would be playing Kyffhaeuser. A malicious democrat, to be sure, might be struck by quite a different thought. He might call attention to the fact that the most intellecual of the Hohenzollerns, Frederick II., and Frederick William IV., had no beards, but that the hero-emperor and this son, like their bushy brother, Victor Emanuel, let theirs grow into regular coachmen's beards, as if anxious to manifest thereby their ability to guide the wagon of state. What a mysterious thing it is, this hair in the face! With our first ancestors, the apes, who did not yet indulge in any reflections on womanhood and manhood, much less on humanity, and who had no women as yet, but only females, the latter, according to Darwin, also had hairy faces; but as the female gradually became a woman, the hair disappeared, and if we should now imagine our women with hairy cheeks, our hair would stand on end. Does the beardless face of the woman not indicate