Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/265

graded one-half of humanity to be the servant and slave of the other half. Only nature and reason can assign us our proper place; all religions begin and end with our degradation, but especially the Christian religion, the most unnatural and inhuman of all. Have Christians ever doubted the human nature of male man? Have they ever classified him as an animal? In the middle ages the question was discussed whether woman was a human being. But they nevertheless, since they could not do without her, assigned ther a high position in the divine royal family, not, however, without first divesting her of all womanly or human attributes, except the "seven swords" in her breast. Perhaps this, too, is an illustration to the Christian command: Taceat mulier in ecclesia — "let the woman be silent in the church" — she may not speak, but she may weap. And she has indeed wept enough, both with and without swords in her breast, and not only in the Christian church. I hear her weeping in the Mohammedan church, where she is driven in troops to satisfy male lust; I hear her weeping in the Babylonian church, where she was at the mercy of every stranger, for money, which the priest pocketed; I hear her weeping in the Hindoo church, which drove her living into the flames, that it might write a ghastly epitaph for the dead master with the coal of the burned slave. Hundreds of thousands and millions of these epitaphshave been written since the religious campaign of Alexander, during two thousand years, and they are