Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/67

Rh all the more magnanimous the more cause we have to depend on the magnanimity of others. Of this truth not an iota is corroborated where the views of men with respect to women are concerned. The greater the injustice a husband does to his wife, the less is he willing to submit to from her; the oftener he becomes unfaithful to her, the stricter he is in demanding faithfulness from her. We see that despotism nowhere denies its own nature: the more a despot deceives and abuses his people, the more submissiveness and faithfulness he demands of them.

Who can be astonished at the many unhappy marriages, if he knows how unworthy most men are of their wives! Their virtues they rarely can appreciate, and their vices they generally call out by their own. Thousands of women suffer from the results of a mode of life of which they, having remained pure in their thought, have no conception whatever; and many an unsuspecting wife nurses her husband with tenderest care in sicknesses which are nothing more than the consequences of his amours with other women. And when at last, after long years of delusion and endurance, the scales drop from the eyes of the wife, and revenge or despair drives her into a hostile position towards her lord and master, she is an inhuman criminal, and the hue and cry against the fickleness of women and the falsity of their nature is endless.