As to the priests who continue the teachings of their master, it suffices to refer them to what I said to M. Comte in the _Revue Philosophique_ of December, 1855. The women of the present time are in general intelligent, because they receive an education superior to that of their mothers. The majority of them devote themselves to an active life either in the arts or the trades; men acknowledge them as their competitors in these, and even confess that they are superior in management. No man, worthy of the name, would dare contest that woman is his equal, and that the day of her civil emancipation is close at hand. Women, on their side, more independent and more deserving, without having lost anything of their grace and gentleness, no longer accept the famous axiom: _man should support woman_; still less do they accept the _admirable_ maxim of Aristotle, fit for the slaves of the gyneceum. Be sure that every _true_ woman will laugh at the raiment of clouds which you pretend to give her, at the incense with which you wish to asphyxiate her; for she cares no longer for adoration. She wishes to carry her intellect and activity unfettered into spheres suited to her aptitudes; she wishes to aid her brother, man, in clearing up the field of theory, the domain of practice; she claims that every human being is the judge of his own aptitudes; she does not recognize in any man or in any doctrine the right of fixing her place, and of marking out her road. Through the labor of war was the patriciate constituted; through peaceful labor was servitude emancipated; _through labor_, also, does woman claim to conquer her civil rights. Such is what many women are, what they wish to be to-day; see if it is not madness to seek to revive the gyneceum and the atrium for these women, impregnated with the ideas of the eighteenth century, wrought upon by the ideas of '89 and of the modern reformers. To say to such women that they shall have no place in the state, nor in marriage, nor in science, nor in art, nor in the trades, nor even in your subjective paradise, is something so monstrous that I cannot conceive, for my part, how aberration could go so far. You will no longer find an interlocutress to say: "that a woman can scarcely ever deserve a personal and public apotheosis ... that views involving the fullest experience and the profoundest reflection are _naturally interdicted_ to the sex whose contemplations can scarcely go beyond the circle of private life _with success_ ... that _the moral degradation of woman is_ _still greater when she enriches herself by her own labor_ ... that there are no worse industrial chiefs than women...." And if any woman behind the times should be so imbecile and immodest as to hold such language, all men of any worth whatever would regard her only with disdain.