Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/398

382 woman, without whom the "strong sex" would feel so desperately lonely that it would have to curse its own existence. Alas, that the greatest part of the curse still falls upon the weaker sex, whose deplorable lot of misery, grief and shame, in hundreds of millions of its degraded members, impeaches male brutality, baseness and want of conscience! If humanity is one hundred thousand years old we men have to atone to women for a wrong of one hundred thousand years' standing, and we can do that only if, by granting them equal rights most completely, we give them an opportunity of not only bettering their own lot, but also of helping to make us unworthy ones worthy of them. Who can realize the self-delusion of egotism that it requires not to be surprised at the monstrous contradiction of which man makes himself guilty in refusing rights, most obstinately and most invidiously, just there where he claims to be ruled by the most tender regards, and the most powerful affections! To the despised negro he grants his rights, because he is forced to do so by the stress of circumstances; to the adored woman he refuses them because she is not backed by an overpowering necessity that came to the aid of the negro. Even with the promptings of his most powerful, most irrepressible emotions, only force, and not a voluntary resolution, can bring him to acknowledge and grant rights which he cannot contest on any reasonable grounds. Does this not prove the shameful fact that the entire male