to rest upon
foundations of justice and equality of human rights....

To-day these considerations (especially the failure fully to
apply the doctrine of equality of human rights to women, even in
the most advanced centers of modern civilization) have an
especial and most fateful significance in relation to the women
of the more backward races as they are brought into contact with
our modern civilization. I said the peoples with whom we are now
being brought as a nation into vital relationship may be still in
the matriarchate. If they are not, most of them are certainly in
some transition stage from that to the father-rule. Not all
peoples have had to pass through the entire subjection of women
to men which marked our ancestral advance. The more persistent
tribal relationship and collective family life have sometimes
softened the process of social growth which was so harsh for
women under the old Roman law and the later English common law.
It may be that the dusky races of Africa and of the islands of
the sea, as well as our Aryan cousins of India, may pass more
easily through the stages of attachment of man's responsibility
to the family life than we, with our tough fiber of character,
were able to do. If so, in the name of justice they should have
the chance!

But if we, who have not yet "writ large" in law and political
rights that respect for woman which all our education, industry,
religion, art, home life and social culture express; if we, who
are still inconsistent and not yet out of the transition stage
from the father-rule to the equal reign of both sexes; if we lay
violent hands upon these backward peoples and give them only our
law and our political rights as they relate to women, we shall do
horrible injustice to the savage women, and through them to the
whole process of social growth for their people. When we tried to
divide "in severalty" the lands of the American Indian, we did
violence to all his own sense of justice and co-operative feeling
when we failed to recognize the women of the tribes in the
distribution. We then and there gave the Indian the worst of the
white man's relationship to his wife, and failed utterly, as in
the nature of the case we must have done, to give him the best of
the white man's relation to hi