Page:A Few Hours in a Far Off Age.djvu/55

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56
A FEW HOURS IN A FAR-OFF AGE.

lished—thanks to large-minded editors, whose thought has taught them valuable lessons in the world's economy. Wherever women are permitted to compete with men the result is amusingly favourable to our sex, when we reflect how pitiably we have been kept by man's doltish enactments imprisoned in one narrow, senseless groove for—who knows how many hundreds of thousands of years?

There are some men who, wishing to excuse the past irrational action of their own sex, say:—" However right it was once to rule over women, it is no longer so, &c." It was never 'right.' If the sexes had started on equal terms the general mind would have sooner expanded, and the beautiful earth would not have been saturated with the blood of advanced thinkers, who have been courageously honourable enough to try to benefit human kind by the honest avowal of their opinions. Women, all, shake off the dangerous apathy into which man's ignorance has thrown you! Teach them, or the earth will again have to treasure away for future learners relics of another fallen nation—teach them no whole can long exist if only one half of it be cared for! It is time men's suicidal oppression should cease. That it will do so is certain, for all the Infinite's works result in perfection, and there can be none in human kind until man become just to woman as to his own sex.

It rests with you whether it shall be soon or late. The sooner you work towards so desirable a completion of wise designs—by rejection of absurdities which have been thrust upon your understanding, and by firm, sensible claim to your rights as humans—the sooner must they yield what they have so long deprived us of—our equal share in the world's advantages; which world is ours, by all moral right, as much as it is theirs.