n as the necessary consequence of existing
conditions, then will they spread, and the one-time minority finally
becomes a majority. So has it been with all new ideas in the course of
history: the idea of establishing the complete emancipation of woman
presents the same experience.

Were not one time the believers in Christianity a small minority? Did
not the Protestant Reformers and modern bourgeoisdom once face
overpowering adversaries? And yet they triumphed. Was the Social
Democracy crippled because gagged and pinioned by exclusion laws, so
that it could not budge? Never was its triumph more assured than when it
was thought to have been killed. The Social Democracy overcame the
exclusion laws; it will overcome quite other obstacles besides.

The claim regarding the "natural calling of woman," according whereto
she should be housekeeper and nurse, is as unfounded as the claim that
there will ever be kings because, since the start of history, there have
been such somewhere. We know not where the first king sprang up, as
little as we know where the first capitalist stepped upon the scene.
This, however, we do know: Kingship has undergone material changes in
the course of the centuries, and the tendency of development is to strip
it ever more of its powers, until a time comes, no longer far away, when
it will be found wholly superfluous. As with the kingship, so with all
other social and political institutions; they are all subject to
continuous changes and transformations, and to final and complete decay.
We have seen, in the course of the preceding historic sketch, that the
form of marriage, in force to-day, like the position of woman, was by no
means such "eternally"; that, on the contrary, both were the product of
a long process of development, which has by no means reached its acme,
and can reach it only in the future. If 2,400 or 2,300 years ago
Demosthenes could designate the "bringing forth of legitimate children
and officiating as a faithful warder of the house" as the only
occupation of woman, to-day we have traveled past that point. Who,
to-day, would dare uphold such a position of woman as "natural" without
exposing himself to the charge of belittling her? True enough, there are
even to-day such sots, who share in silence the views of the old
Athenian; but none dare proclaim publicly that which 2,300 years ago one
of the most eminent orators dared proclaim frankly and openly as
_natural_. Therein lies the gr