ther god on the earth
besides her husband. She must worship him while he lives, and when he
dies she must be burned with him. In case she is not burned, she is
not allowed to marry, and is considered an outcast. There is little
social intercourse between the sexes, little or no acquaintance of the
parties before marriage, and, consequently, little mutual attachment.
Women are not allowed to learn to read, because there can be no solid
foundation laid for future influence.

Under the Crescent the condition of woman is worse rather than better,
for in pagan India she is permitted to share in the hope of religion;
but in Mohammedan countries it is a popular tradition that women are
forbidden paradise; and it requires some effort for the imagination to
conceive how debased and wretched must be the condition of the
female sex to originate and sustain such a horrible and blasphemous
tradition.

Even in the refined and shining ages of Greece and Rome, where the
cultivation of letters and the graces of polished style, the charms
of poetry and eloquence, the elegances of architecture, sculpture,
painting, and embroidery, the glory of conquest and the pride of
national distinction, were unsurpassed,--even then and there, woman
was but the abject slave of man, the object of his ambition, avarice,
lust, and power.

Truly has it been said that nothing more surely distinguishes the
savage state from the civilized, the East from the West, Paganism from
Christianity, antiquity from the middle ages, the middle ages from
modern times, than the condition of woman.

In China, she is used as a beast of burden. The Chinese peasant woman
goes to the field with her male infant on her back, and ploughs, sows,
and reaps, exposed to all the changes of the weather. In Calcutta,
women are the masons, and maybe seen daily conveying their hods of
cement, and spreading it on the tops of their houses.

In a country where no European man can labor, where the native rests
until compelled by his conqueror to work, seven thousand of these
women might have been seen, in 1859, climbing to the edge of ravines,
with baskets of stone on their heads, to fill, with these tedious
contributions, thousands of perpendicular feet, in order that a
railroad might wind among the mountains.

In Australia, she carries the burden which man's indolence refuses;
and in Great Britain, the condition of women among the lower classes,
revealed by the statistics of her min