Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/327

them. But what does the reading matter, that is placed before them as their intellectual food, offer them? Disregarding religious papers, which selfevidently are or ought to be excluded from our circles, we are offered little more than the daily reiterated, stupid disgusting disputes of the party slaves, who try to mutually outdo each other, both in their accusations, and in their defenses, by unscrupulous lying; or reprints of the most unprincipled and corrupt fiction, by which servile litterateurs in Germany try to keep the oppressed subjects from thinking about their execrable conditions. The whole land is deluged with the organs of the party slaves, and the products of the manufacturers of "entertaining literature." Every means, even the most mendicant, is adopted for their circulation, and peddling agents obtrude themselves into every house, for the special purpose of inducing women to buy their wares. It is not astonishing that with such reading matter, which is intended only for subjects, even the free spirit of the republic is led astray, mind's become effeminate or poisoned, and good taste corrupted. We deplore the stagnation of all intellectual life, and the want of sympathy for higher aspirations, among the German women of this country. Is anything else to be expected, when we consider the character of their intellectual food, which consists mainly of criminal stories, insipid tea-table novels, local gossip, the advertisements of fortune-tellers, or masked medical murderers, etc.? All this litera-