y apt either to
have no wife at all or else four or five. If a Franciscan friar of the
olden time happened to glance at a clothesline on which, gaily waving in
the wanton winds, was a smock-frock, he wore peas in his sandals for a
month and a day.

The Shaker does not count women out because the founder of the sect was a
woman, but he is a complete celibate and depends on Gentiles to populate
the earth. The Dunkard quotes Saint Paul and marries because he must, but
regards romantic love as a thing of which Deity is jealous, and also a bit
ashamed. The Oneida Community clung to the same thought, and to
obliterate selfishness held women in common, tracing pedigree, after the
manner of ancient Sparta, through the female line, because there was no
other way. The Mormon incidentally and accidentally adopted polygamy.

The Quakers have for the best part looked with disfavor on passionate
love. In the worship of Deity they separate women from men. But all
oscillations are equalized by swingings to the other side. The Quakers
have often discarded a distinctive marriage-ceremony, thus slanting toward
natural selection. And I might tell you of how in one of the South
American States there is a band of Friends who have discarded the rite
entirely, making marriage a private and personal contract between the man
and the woman--a sacred matter of conscience; and should the man and woman
find after a trial that their mating was a mistake, they are as free to
separate as they were to marry, and no obloquy is attached in any event.
Harriet Martineau, Quaker in sympathy, although not in name, being an
independent fighter armed with a long squirrel-rifle of marvelous range
and accuracy, pleaded strongly and boldly for a law that would make
divorce as free and simple as marriage. Harriet once called marriage a
mouse-trap, and thereby sent shivers of surprise and indignation up a
bishop's back.

But there is one thing among all these quasi-ascetic sects that has ever
been in advance of the great mass of humanity from which they are
detached parts: they have given woman her rights; whereas, the mass has
always prated, and does yet, mentioning it in statute law, that the male
has certain natural "rights," and the women only such rights as are
granted her by the males. And the reason of this wrong-headed attitude on
part of the mob is plain. It rules by force, whereas the semi-ascetic
sects decry force, using only moral suasion, falling back