ealth of another person to danger, or to shun it
himself. Every one considers that shameful and brutal which Schuyler
relates of the Kirghiz in times of tempest,--to send out the women and
the aged females to hold fast the corners of the _kibitka_ [tent] during
the storm, while they themselves continue to sit within the tent, over
their _kumis_ [fermented mare's-milk]. Every one thinks it shameful to
make a week man work for one; that it is still more disgraceful in time
of danger--on a burning ship, for example,--being strong, to be the first
to seat one's self in the lifeboat,--to thrust aside the weak and leave
them in danger, and so on.

All men regard this as disgraceful, and would not do it upon any account,
in certain exceptional circumstances; but in every-day life, the very
same actions, and others still worse, are concealed from them by
delusions, and they perpetrate them incessantly. The establishment of
this new view of life is the business of public opinion. Public opinion,
supporting such a view, will speedily be formed.

Women form public opinion, and women are especially powerful in our day.

TO WOMEN.

As stated in the Bible, a law was given to the man and the woman,--to the
man, the law of labor; to the woman, the law of bearing children.
Although we, with our science, _avons change tout ca_, the law for the
man, as for woman, remains as unalterable as the liver in its place, and
departure from it is equally punished with inevitable death. The only
difference lies in this, that departure from the law, in the case of the
man, is punished so immediately in the future, that it may be designated
as present punishment; but departure from the law, in the case of the
woman, receives its chastisement in a more distant future.

The general departure of all men from the law exterminates people
immediately; the departure from it of all women annihilates it in the
succeeding generation. But the evasion by some men and some women does
not exterminate the human race, and only deprives those who evade it of
the rational nature of man. The departure of men from this law began long
ago, among those classes who were in a position to subject others, and,
constantly spreading, it has continued down to our own times; and in our
own day it has reached folly, the ideal consisting in evasion of the
law,--the ideal expressed by Prince Blokhin, and shared in by Renan and
by the whole cultivated world: "Machine