oducts of
civilization worth the price which we women have been compelled to pay,
in order that they may exist? Is our subjection justifiable?" In reply,
the men who entertain an innate contempt for woman answer, "Yes"; those
who are moved by the extreme opposite of sentiment have arrived at the
bitter, though chivalrous, thought, "Better the non-existence of the
human race than the continued sacrifice of its womankind"; while even
the sons of the golden mean in judgment go so far as to say that not
only the already acquired benefits of civilization, but finer ones and
more abundant, can from now on be attained by some other process, which
will involve no degradation either to workingman or to woman, and which
in structural principle and human effects will differ as much from
civilization as civilization itself differed from the barbarism and
savagery which preceded it.

My own judgment is, that civilization is nearing its close. Four or
five deadly blows were dealt out to it by four or five events which
happened in the middle of the fifteenth century after Christ, and it
has been staggering ever since. In that century, certain things
occurred which produced the very opposite effect upon the masses of
mankind to that produced by the wonderful thing which had happened ten
thousand years ago and by its occurrence had changed radically the
relation of men and women to the community and to the physical universe
in which they lived. What was begun in the fifteenth century by the
events that took place then, and what was continued as a destructive
process until recently, is, in my judgment, being finished now through
a constructive process which has been set up by certain other
things--some ten or twenty--which have happened since the beginning of
the present century.

X. A NEW STRUCTURAL PRINCIPLE

It has seemed to me necessary at this point in my argument to call
attention to the introduction into social life in the fifteenth century
of a new working principle which has been in direct antagonism to the
basic idea of civilization, because it must be borne in mind that
during the last four centuries the history of Europe and the New World
furnishes illustrations of two conflicting processes of social
integration. Not everything that has happened since the New World was
discovered can be set down to the credit of that process which is still
ascendant in Prussia. Instances, therefore, from modern history which
go ag