a Law
prohibiting the Alphabet to Women."[1] Daring, keen, sarcastic, learned,
the little tract retains to-day so much of its pungency, that we can hardly
wonder at the honest simplicity of the author's friend and biographer,
Madame Gacon Dufour, who declared that he must be insane, and soberly
replied to him.

His proposed statute consists of eighty-two clauses, and is fortified by a
"whereas" of a hundred and thirteen weighty reasons. He exhausts the range
of history to show the frightful results which have followed this taste of
fruit of the tree of knowledge; quotes from the Encyclopedie, to prove that
the woman who knows the alphabet has already lost a portion of her
innocence; cites the opinion of Moliere, that any female who has unhappily
learned anything in this line should affect ignorance, when possible;
asserts that knowledge rarely makes men attractive, and females never;
opines that women have no occasion to peruse Ovid's "Art of Love," since
they know it all in advance; remarks that three quarters of female authors
are no better than they should be; maintains that Madame Guion would have
been far more useful had she been merely pretty and an ignoramus, such as
Nature made her,--that Ruth and Naomi could not read, and Boaz probably
would never have married into the family had they possessed that
accomplishment,--that the Spartan women did not know the alphabet, nor the
Amazons, nor Penelope, nor Andromache, nor Lucretia, nor Joan of Arc, nor
Petrarch's Laura, nor the daughters of Charlemagne, nor the three hundred
and sixty-five wives of Mohammed; but that Sappho and Madame de Maintenon
could read altogether too well; while the case of Saint Brigitta, who
brought forth twelve children and twelve books, was clearly exceptional,
and afforded no safe precedent.

It would seem that the brilliant Frenchman touched the root of the matter.
Ought women to learn the alphabet? There the whole question lies. Concede
this little fulcrum, and Archimedea will move the world before she has done
with it: it becomes merely a question of time. Resistance must be made here
or nowhere. _Obsta principiis_. Woman must be a subject or an equal: there
is no middle ground. What if the Chinese proverb should turn out to be,
after all, the summit of wisdom, "For men, to cultivate virtue is
knowledge; for women, to renounce knowledge is virtue"?

No doubt, the progress of events is slow, like the working of the laws of
gravitation