in men, and who herd with men of that stamp, calling unmanly whatever is refined in men, while they call unwomanly whatever is self-helpful in woman. Would you believe it, Lettie, I have even heard women say that they rather like boys to be cruel? What can you expect of boys who are brought up by such females as that? It is not uncommon to hear shallow people say that boys are naturally cruel, mischievous, and coarse, This is a libel and slander from top to bottom. Boys are not naturally anything of the sort; they, like girls, are the victims of society’s folly and perverseness. A different training is devised for each, and is suitable to neither; they are distorted in opposite directions, hence the evils you and I complain of when those girls and boys become grown-up women and men.
‘“From the sole of the foot,” says the same prophet I quoted before, “even unto the crown of the head, there is no soundness, but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores; they have not been closed nor bound up,” etc., etc. But, I repeat, you must not put any of these things down to nature, unless, indeed, upon the principle humanum est errare. It is not in the nature of women to be servile, nor are they naturally attracted by what is base in men; it is not natural in men to usurp women’s place, and by so doing make a burlesque of religion and defile the spiritual atmosphere. These moral obliquities are repugnant to the better nature in each sex, as disease is opposed to health. We must not acquiesce in them as natural, we must extirpate them as morbid.
‘Nevertheless there is, after all, a sense in which you may correctly say that woman is attracted downwards towards man, but it is that sense in which we are all ‘attracted downward’ to our lower animal functions. If the digestion does not go on as it should, not only the stomach, but through it the thoughts and the temper become deranged;
