Page:A Few Hours in a Far Off Age.djvu/65

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66
A FEW HOURS IN A FAR-OFF AGE.

base concealments in either. No more-than-half-mock deference on one side, received hypocritically with ill-disguised disgust on the other—too often to be seen in the so-called unions of my era. How different is the real union of these very dear friends and companions! Of all enchanting experiences in this far-away age, I have met none more beautiful, more elevating, or so fully expressive of true happiness as the loving and most honorable bond everywhere existing between married persons. Such can never exist between master and slave; neither can it ever grow between self-styled superiors and those they have been taught to consider their inferiors. There never was, and never can be, so high a union while law places one above the other, whether that one be so in reality or not. There are very few marriages where ability is equally balanced—in some the woman's is greater, in some the man's. This natural supremacy, if justice reigned, would adjust itself without heartburnings to any; but so long as law makes one sex dominant—by virtue of sex only—and to that one gives all honors, and opens every avenue to distinction, to the exclusion of the grandest intellect—if the owner be not of that sex—there can reign nothing but disaster everywhere. For the offspring of marriage under such iniquitous laws can only be so much increase to the injustice, deceit, oppression, and all degrading wrongs which have polluted, and still pollute, communities, high and low, past and present, throughout the whole world. For noble happiness to exist between wife and husband, there must be perfect equality of world power. Their interests are the same—the advancement of their species—and one can no more accomplish that without the other than perpetuate it without the other. The time must come when women shall unite with men in