regarded woman as the diminutive of man. The proof was in the origin of
Eve: she was the superfluous bone, the thirteenth rib which Adam
possessed in the beginning. It has at last been admitted that woman
possesses a soul like our own, but even superior in tenderness and
devotion. She has been allowed to educate herself, which she has done at
least as zealously as her coadjutor. But the law, that gloomy cavern
which is still the lurking-place of so many barbarities, continues to
regard her as an incapable and a minor. The law in turn will finally
surrender to the truth.

The abolition of slavery and the education of woman: these are two
enormous strides upon the path of moral progress. Our descendants will
go farther. They will see, with a lucidity capable of piercing every
obstacle, that war is the most hopeless of all absurdities. That our
conquerors, victors of battles and destroyers of nations, are detestable
scourges; that a clasp of the hand is preferable to a rifle-shot; that
the happiest people is not that which possesses the largest battalions,
but that which labours in peace and produces abundantly; and that the
amenities of existence do not necessitate the existence of frontiers,
beyond which we meet with all the annoyances of the custom-house, with
its officials who search our pockets and rifle our luggage.

Our descendants will see this and many other marvels which to-day are
extravagant dreams. To what ideal height will the process of evolution
lead mankind? To no very magnificent height, it is to be feared. We are
afflicted by an indelible taint, a kind of original sin, if we may call
sin a state of things with which our will has nothing to do. We are made
after a certain pattern and we can do nothing to change ourselves. We
are marked with the mark of the beast, the taint of the belly, the
inexhaustible source of bestiality.

The intestine rules the world. In the midst of our most serious affairs
there intrudes the imperious question of bread and butter. So long as
there are stomachs to digest--and as yet we are unable to dispense with
them--we must find the wherewithal to fill them, and the powerful will
live by the sufferings of the weak. Life is a void that only death can
fill. Hence the endless butchery by which man nourishes himself, no less
than beetles and other creatures; hence the perpetual holocausts which
make of this earth a knacker's yard, beside which the slaughter-houses
of Chicago are