The extended barbaric relations which your women hold to men, though greatly modified by civilization, has carried with it enough of its primary feelings and motives to influence a large majority of your matrimonial engagements, where in truth, it may be said that the attraction is sensual to a degree not willingly acknowledged, and this being more and more the case as you descend in the social scale, you will find here your women going through life helplessly subject to the lingering brutalism which your customs and laws enforce. It is from the animalism of these low life marriages that a large sum of your miseries and crimes are produced. Your inferior men have but little respect for those subject to their power, and in many cases use a tyrannical authority over their defenseless wives in gratification of a mean instinct of humanity. It is the only opportunity perhaps that brutal husbands enjoy in their whole lives to command a grown person who is under an obligation by law, custom and religion to obey. Such a dangerous subjection of one human being to another could only be excused by a certainty that the welfare of your society depended upon it, when in fact the condition is one of the obstacles to a better social state. During your barbaric period, and for a long time thereafter, women made no protest against her subordinate position in society. It has been her place for ages to suffer more than her share of the pains and trials of human replenishment. She has been taught to believe that this was her only part in the world’s economy, and men have held her to it by all the force of ecclesiastical and secular bonds. In all your glorious modern achievements of science and general knowledge until lately she has not even been an invited spectator. While the world in front has been all astir in the movements of progress, she has only been permitted to listen and wonder at the applause through the rear windows of the nursery and kitchen; not knowing what it all meant and not educated to approve, or even to understand, its glorious import. Having never been accustomed to think on any great subject, she has held to her traditions after they have been discredited and denied by the knowledge of her times, and imparting them to childhood in all their ancient mixture of error has assisted to keep alive those prejudices among you which have so seriously blocked your advancement. This is one of the penalties you have paid for your subjection of women. Those traditions to which she so defiantly clings she will never be persuaded to discard in her present dependent condition. It may be said to her honor that they are mistakenly pursued as the only great method within her reach to indulge her concern for human welfare. You must give her new duties, and arouse in her new ambitions, before you can expect her to take her proper place beside man in the march of progress. It is only within the last two or three generations that a glint of the