festering community is the best that the greatest masculine race the world ever saw can show, after trying a thousand years! while the rapid downward rush of American politics and morals is filling every thoughtful mind with terror.
Observing all these disorders and shortcomings in the masculine administration of affairs, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that there is a missing element somewhere; and as there is no element in humanity beside the two, that it must be the feminine element. I think, then, that women may very gently say to their brethren, without the least disrespect or self-conceit:
"Ye take too much upon you, ye sons of Adam. We will not meddle with your concerns, but, if you please, we will just help you by attending to our own, which you have, indeed, most kindly tried to manage for us, but have simply got into the worst confusion. We deny, altogether, being 'the lesser man,' and are tired of the rôle of little brother. We are not an accident of nature, we are a necessity of Eternity. Our souls stamp the sex upon our bodies, not our bodies upon our souls. Feminine these are, and feminine they will remain for ever. Why, then, are we to wait for Heaven before we begin our proper development? Do you think that giving a young girl, for a time, the diet and exercise of a prize-fighter would turn her into a man? It would only help to make her a physically strong and perfect woman. So, too, the feminine mind and heart cannot be made masculine by any abundance of education, freedom, and responsibility, but will round, through their means, into curves of beauty and harmony, expressive of force and health indeed, but from these very qualities only the more enchanting. It is not womanhood you get, O men, by the conventional repressing process, but childhood; and thus it is that to this day there is no true marriage of the sexes on the earth, but a lonely and cruel lord stalks through the neglected and unfinished apartments of his ever-widening palace, while she who should be his friend, his love, his wife, drudges with his menials in the basement, or feebly
