the most subtle sophistry of men's passions and
prejudices. But there was never any great wrong righted that was
not intrenched in sophistry--that did not plead an immemorial
antiquity, and what it called the universal consent and
"instinct" of mankind.

I say that the movement is a plea for justice, and I assert that
the equal rights of women, not as citizens, but as human beings,
have never been acknowledged. There is no audacity so insolent,
no tyranny so wanton, no inhumanity so revolting, as the spirit
which says to any human being, or to any class of human beings,
"You shall be developed just as far as we choose, and as fast as
we choose, and your mental and moral life shall be subject to our
pleasure!"

Edward Lear, the artist, traveling in Greece, says that "he was
one day jogging along with an Albanian peasant, who said to him,
'Women are really better than donkeys for carrying burdens, but
not so good as mules.'" This was the honest opinion of
barbarism--the honest feeling of Greece to-day.

You say that the peasant was uncivilized. Very well. Go back to
the age of Pericles; it is the high noon of Greek civilization.
It is Athens--"the eye of Greece--the mother of art." There
stands the great orator--himself incarnate Greece--speaking the
oration over the Peloponnesian dead. "The greatest glory of
woman," he said, "is to be the least talked of among men;" so
said Pericles, when he lived. Had Pericles lived to-day he would
have agreed that to be talked of among men as Miss Martineau and
Florence Nightingale are, as Mrs. Somerville and Maria Mitchell
are, is as great a glory as to be the mother of the Gracchi.
Women in Greece, the mothers of Greece, were an inferior and
degraded class. And Grote sums up their whole condition when he
says, "Every thing which concerned their lives, their happiness,
or their rights, was determined for them by male relatives, and
they seem to have been destitute of all mental culture and
refinement."

These were the old Greeks. Will you have Rome? The chief monument
of Roman civilization is its law--which underlies our own; and
Buckle quotes the great commentator on that law as saying that it
was the distinction of the Roman law that it treated women not as
persons, but as things. Or go to