They who go on disposing of human instincts, human affections and human brains in their own way, according to their own sense of right and wrong, should go further; they should change their meeting-houses and churches into monasteries and convents, and watch the religious aspirations they would control by daily and nightly supervision. Into their homes they should introduce harem espionage, that the bodily instincts, which they hold in enforced compliance, may never have an opportunity to assert the truth about themselves. Heresy and adultery, the two excommunicative words, which social life suspends over the doomed head of a woman who thinks and acts contrary to its rules of action, have not that full power and effect they are supposed to have. Nothing but actual physical imprisonment of the body, and, if it were possible, of the mind, can prevent a woman from becoming the secret avower of her belief and of her instincts. The excommunicative words do not restrain from either offence; they only develop that unquestionable vice of woman’s weakness, hypocrisy. The brain, when infidel, is infidel by its own proper organization, and they who assail its infidelity strike vainly at the God who made it, and implanted it in every newborn soul; the body, when infidel to the connection in which it is placed, is so by its own proper instincts, and they, who attempt to control it, strike, likewise, at a law of its creation. When will narrow-minded, bigoted men learn that the one absolute, controlling law of a woman’s nature is love—that it is the only good and desirable thing about a woman—the only reliable thing about her? They can trust her, with her love, to live in a house of prostitution; they cannot control her, without it, by the most absolute, social ostracism. And this love, what is it? It is a power present always in the world, which, recognized by two like natures, thenceforth binds them to each other, beyond the control, and in violation, if need be, of any other law—as my mother’s love bound her to my father, and my father’s love bound him to her, and gave me my being—a being cradled in the tenderest, truest passion that ever existed between two human beings. How long have I been in ascertaining and yielding myself up to this divine law! What wasted years! What subjections derogatory to the vilest nature! What hypocrisy, dishonoring to God! What suffering have I caused this man, assigned to me alone, since that day on which I first in him recognized myself! It seems so long ago; it seems far longer to me than the time makes it; it seems as if an eternity had rolled backward to that day. Oh, I had questionings of right and wrong in that fathomless interval of despair, far other, far deeper, than all I had been taught or could be taught by their lips—questionings that brought me to the very brink of death.