ess to the general good. They do not understand the great
vitality and durability of institutions which place right on the side
of might; how intensely they are clung to; how the good as well as
the bad propensities and sentiments of those who have power in their
hands, become identified with retaining it; how slowly these bad
institutions give way, one at a time, the weakest first, beginning
with those which are least interwoven with the daily habits of life;
and how very rarely those who have obtained legal power because they
first had physical, have ever lost their hold of it until the
physical power had passed over to the other side. Such shifting of
the physical force not having taken place in the case of women; this
fact, combined with all the peculiar and characteristic features of
the particular case, made it certain from the first that this branch
of the system of right founded on might, though softened in its most
atrocious features at an earlier period than several of the others,
would be the very last to disappear. It was inevitable that this one
case of a social relation grounded on force, would survive through
generations of institutions grounded on equal justice, an almost
solitary exception to the general character of their laws and
customs; but which, so long as it does not proclaim its own origin,
and as discussion has not brought out its true character, is not felt
to jar with modern civilization, any more than domestic slavery among
the Greeks jarred with their notion of themselves as a free people.

The truth is, that people of the present and the last two or three
generations have lost all practical sense of the primitive condition
of humanity; and only the few who have studied history accurately, or
have much frequented the parts of the world occupied by the living
representatives of ages long past, are able to form any mental
picture of what society then was. People are not aware how entirely,
in former ages, the law of superior strength was the rule of life;
how publicly and openly it was avowed, I do not say cynically or
shamelessly--for these words imply a feeling that there was something
in it to be ashamed of, and no such notion could find a place in the
faculties of any person in those ages, except a philosopher or a
saint. History gives a cruel experience of human nature, in shewing
how exactly the regard due to the life, possessions, and entire
earthly happiness of any class of persons, w