not worthy to unloose the latchet of the shoes" of the commonest woman,
much less to "unfasten her girdle," yet they make the most extravagant
demands on the feminine sex. Even the greatest debauchee, who has spent his
vigor in the arms of a hundred courtesans, will cry out fraud and treachery
if he does not receive his newly married bride as an untouched virgin. Even
the most dissolute husband will look on his wife as deserving of death if
his daily infidelity is only once reciprocated. {428}

5. UNJUST DEMANDS.--The greater the injustice a husband does to his wife,
the less he is willing to submit to from her; the oftener he becomes
unfaithful to her, the stricter he is in demanding faithfulness from her.
We see that despotism nowhere denies its own nature: the more a despot
deceives and abuses his people, the more submissiveness and faithfulness he
demands of them.

6. SUFFERING WOMEN.--Who can be astonished at the many unhappy marriages,
if he knows how unworthy most men are of their wives? Their virtues they
rarely can appreciate, and their vices they generally call out by their
own. Thousands of women suffer from the results of a mode of life of which
they, having remained pure in their thought, have no conception whatever;
and many an unsuspecting wife nurses her husband with tenderest care in
sicknesses which are nothing more than the consequences of his amours with
other women.

7. AN INHUMAN CRIMINAL.--When at last, after long years of delusion and
endurance, the scales drop from the eyes of the wife, and revenge or
despair drives her into a hostile position towards her lord and master, she
is an inhuman criminal, and the hue and cry against the fickleness of women
and the falsity of their nature is endless. Oh, the injustice of society
and the injustice of cruel man. Is there no relief for helpless women that
are bound by the ties of marriage to men who are nothing but rotten
corruption?

8. VULGAR DESIRE.--The habit of regarding the end and aim of woman only
from the most vulgar side--not to respect in her the noble human being, but
to see in her only the instrument of sensual desire--is carried so far
among men that they will allow it to force into the background
considerations among themselves, which they otherwise pretend to rank very
high.

[Illustration]

9. THE ONLY REMEDY.--But when the feeling of women has once been driven to
indignation with respect to the position which they occupy, it is to