Page:Uncivil Liberty.djvu/16

 to be the shadow, or echo of man, we mar creative intention, and rob society of the better service which intuitive sense waits to render. The value of self-supporting independence doubtless suggested the remark of a wit—"A wife is a fortune—when she is poor." As the adjective is said to be the greatest enemy of the noun, though agreeing with it in gender, number and person, so woman as an adjective, an appendage of man, is useless or worse to him, and a mockery to herself, having an inalienable right to be a noun, a person accountable to infinite intelligence. Since in correcting wrong we enact right, men's actual influence will not only be lessened, but vastly increased, by abolishing the despotic and irresponsible power they now wield. If authority is natural and beneficent, the votes of a world united cannot overthrow it; if it is usurped, the quicker if falls the better.

Fascinating weakness, "sweet irresponsibility," becomes a nullity, or hostile, when allegiance is forced, and suggests truth in an old maxim, "As many slaves, so many enemies. Since we offer a premium to adverse influence, practical sense and persuasive eloquence are turned against us; "measures which statesmen have meditated a whole year may be overturned by women in a day," and often have they conquered a nation by simply making up faces. The victims of false deference on one hand and tyrannical subjection on the other, they win through diplomatic artifice, or by sacrifices inconsistent with personal and social well-being. Impulses, which rightly directed would outflow in tenderness and rectitude, invigorate, adorn and bless mankind, now take the sexes to houses of assignation, and the very materials with which perfect society will be constructed, when the builder arrives, are added fuel to flaming heats our ignorance kindles. The "social evil," which despairing philanthropy says "no law can restrain and no power suppress," is a vast business system of supply and demand, whose natural causes and retributive results point outcast and outcasters to the ways of healthful sanity. Not to quote Solomon and Sampson, the reputed wisest and strongest of men, both of whom were conquered by women, why in Europe and America to-day are men of genius, writers, statesmen and reformers, involved in family feuds, tenants of desolate homes, wanderers from what should be domestic quiet, or indulging in practices they dare not defend as right? These things cannot be dismissed with a sneer, or religiously attributed to the Prince of Evil; for the devil is only unexplained adversity, and may yet turn out to be Deity in disguise. The old theory of natural depravity and vicarious atonement will no longer serve to darken counsel with words; for the instincts and attractions God made are not essentially unclean. Conjugal law, which in all ages and nations has "confined woman to one man, has never confined man to one women." Virtuous Congressmen, who urge war on Mormon polygamists, should first face domestic problems at home, whose solution will require clearer heads and braver hearts than have yet appeared. In Utah husbands are responsible for their wives, required by law, at least, to provide them bread. In Boston and New York men are quite as much married, though in a clandestine and unscrupulous way. Spectacled book-worms may explore traditions of the past, grave divines declaim against of morals, conceited stoics affect to be superior to fascination, but the fact remains that woman, incarnating love, has ruled and will rule man, for better for worse, just in proportion as she is assured or denied a right to herself. Not responsible to law, because