y system of privilege and enforced
subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are
kept down by it, this has. I have not yet shown that it is a wrong
system: but every one who is capable of thinking on the subject must
see that even if it is, it was certain to outlast all other forms of
unjust authority. And when some of the grossest of the other forms
still exist in many civilized countries, and have only recently been
got rid of in others, it would be strange if that which is so much
the deepest-rooted had yet been perceptibly shaken anywhere. There is
more reason to wonder that the protests and testimonies against it
should have been so numerous and so weighty as they are.

Some will object, that a comparison cannot fairly be made between the
government of the male sex and the forms of unjust power which I have
adduced in illustration of it, since these are arbitrary, and the
effect of mere usurpation, while it on the contrary is natural. But
was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those
who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into
two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves,
appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the
only natural, condition of the human race. No less an intellect, and
one which contributed no less to the progress of human thought, than
Aristotle, held this opinion without doubt or misgiving; and rested
it on the same premises on which the same assertion in regard to the
dominion of men over women is usually based, namely that there are
different natures among mankind, free natures, and slave natures;
that the Greeks were of a free nature, the barbarian races of
Thracians and Asiatics of a slave nature. But why need I go back to
Aristotle? Did not the slaveowners of the Southern United States
maintain the same doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men
cling to the theories that justify their passions and legitimate
their personal interests? Did they not call heaven and earth to
witness that the dominion of the white man over the black is natural,
that the black race is by nature incapable of freedom, and marked out
for slavery? some even going so far as to say that the freedom of
manual labourers is an unnatural order of things anywhere. Again, the
theorists of absolute monarchy have always affirmed it to be the only
natural form of government; issuing from the patriarchal, which