Regard the incidents of a Jewish wooing, in which the woman had no voice, and of the marriage, the infernal punishments for adultery, and the accounts of the seraglios of the Hebrew kings equalled only by Turkish harems, and some of the passages in the inspired Book of Numbers, for instance, in which the horrible truth is frequently too evident, and only equalled by the fact that after lust had played out its passion, unfortunate women, taken in captivity, could, by divine command, be turned adrift to rot or starve. In Christian Feudalism we find nothing much better. If I have read history correctly, and I may be wrong--the upper-grade women in mediaeval Europe, who were adored, not with love, but with lascivious and sensual worship, by Christian knights and troubadours, and who, like criminals to the halter, were forced, rarely with their own consent, into the arms of men they disliked or had never seen, or were placed in conventual houses against their wills. Of the lower-grade women, I need only offer one example--and that is sufficient to show their awful degradation; the French and German feudal lord had the right of _cuissage_, or, in plain English, the embraces of his serf-retainer's bride on the marriage night. Shelley considered that in consequence of all this, men had forgotten their duties to the other sex, and that even at the time at which he lived woman was still in great social bondage, improperly educated, tied down by restrictions, and refused participation in the higher positions of labor. He called not in vain, against the inequality of the sexes, and asserted that woman's position must and should be altered by forgetting the tyranny of the past, and, be determined, for the good of the future. We should be rejoiced that eloquent exponents of the abominations of former ages, the evils of the present, and the proper position of the future, are now hard at work. The "Women's Rights" party is up teaching men their duties on every continent; in distant India, the Brahmo Somaj is battling, not vainly, against the horrors of the Zenana, and in conservative England, which has been stormed, and the forlorn hope is now taking possession of the citadel; everywhere it is the same. Yes, woman, thanks to Shelley and the reformers, is about to be emancipated and free; free to earn her living, how, where, and when she likes; the equal of man, who shall no longer play such fantastic tricks as he did in the past, in proof of his dignity and superiority. The fourth of July is not long past and gone; I trust that in the dim vista of the future, our descendants will keep a national holiday, or a day to be set apart on which shall be celebrated the "Declaration of the Independence of Women," and then, perhaps, Shelley's description of woman in the "Episychidion" will be more apparent: