By respect for our readers; By respect for myself. You find yourself ill at ease in the Popilian circle that has been traced around you by the hand of a woman; all understand this, I among the rest. Ill-armed for defence, worse armed, perhaps, for attack, you would like to escape; but your skill as a tactician will avail you nothing; you shall not quit the fatal circle till vanquished, either by me, or by yourself, if you confess your weakness on the point in litigation, by continuing to refuse a discussion under flimsy pretexts, or, lastly, by public opinion, which will award to you the quality of inconsistency, the least desirable of all to a dialectician. This being understood, I must tell you that, personally, I am satisfied that you should attack, in _the rights of woman_, the cause of justice and progress. It is an augury of success to this cause; you have always been fatal to all that you have sought to sustain. It is true that your attitude in this question makes you _the ally of the dogmatism of the Middle Age_; it is true that the _official representatives_ of this dogmatism avail themselves, at the present time, of your arguments and your name to maintain their influence over women, and through them over men and children; and this in order to revive the past, to stifle the future. Is this your intention? I do not believe it. You are, in my eyes, a subverter, a destroyer, in whom instinct sometimes gets the better of intellect, and from whom it shuts out a clear view of the consequences of his writings. Formed for strife, you must have adversaries; and, in default of enemies, you cruelly fall on those who are fighting in the same ranks with yourself. In all your writings, one feels that the second part of education--that which inspires respect and love of woman--is completely wanting in you. Let us come to your letter. You reproach me with having made _forty paralogisms_; it was your duty at least to have cited one of these. However, let us see. You say: between man and woman there is a separation of _the same nature as that which the difference of race establishes between animals_. Woman, by nature and destination, is _neither associate, nor citizen, nor functionary_. She is, until marriage, only _apprentice_, at most, _under-superintendent_ in the social workshop; she is a _minor_ in the family, and _does not form a part of the commonwealth_. You conceive of no destiny for her outside of the household: she can be only _housewife_ or _courtesan_. She is incapable _of understanding and of governing herself_. To make a paralogism is to draw a conclusion from false premises; now did I conclude from such in saying: In order that all these paradoxes may become truths, you have to prove: That man and woman are not of the same race;