[84] "Das buergerliche Recht und die besitzlosen Klassen," Tuebingen, 1890.
[85] Sam. Lucas, Elberfeld.
CHAPTER II.
FURTHER CHECKS AND OBSTRUCTIONS TO MARRIAGE—NUMERICAL PROPORTION OF THE SEXES—ITS CAUSES AND EFFECTS.
Cast in the mold of the conditions above described, many a feature of woman's character took shape, and they reached ever fuller development from generation to generation. On these features men love to dwell with predilection, but they forget that they are themselves the cause thereof, and have promoted with their conduct the defects they now make merry about, or censure. Among these widely censured female qualities, belong her dreaded readiness of tongue, and passion for gossip; her inclination to endless talk over trifles and unimportant things; her mental bent for purely external matters, such as dress, and her desire to please, together with a resulting proneness to all the follies of fashion; lastly, her easily arousable envy and jealousy of the other members of her sex.
These qualities, though in different degrees, manifest themselves generally in the female sex from early childhood. They are qualities that are born under the pressure of social conditions, and are further developed by heredity, example and education. A being irrationally brought up, can not bring up others rationally.
In order to be clear on the causes and development of good or bad qualities, whether with the sexes or with whole peoples, the same methods must be pursued that modern natural science applies in order to ascertain the formation and development of life according to genus and species, and to determine their qualities. They are the laws that flow from the material conditions for life, laws that life demands, that adapt themselves to it, and finally became its nature.
Man forms no exception to that which holds good in Nature for all animate creation. Man does not stand outside of Nature: looked at physiologically, he is the most highly developed animal,—a fact, however, that some would deny. Thousands of years ago, although wholly ignorant of modern science, the ancients had on many matters affecting man, more rational views than the moderns; above all, they gave practical application to the views founded on experience. We praise with enthusiastic admiration the beauty and strength of the men and women of Greece; but the fact is overlooked that, not the happy climate, nor the bewitching nature of a territory that stretched along the bay-indented sea, but the physical culture and maxims of education, consistently enforced by the State, thus affected both the being and the development of the population. These measures were calculated to combine beauty, strength and suppleness of body with wit and elasticity of mind, both of which were transmitted to the descendants. True enough, even then, in comparison with man, woman was neglected in point of mental, but not of corporal culture.[86] In Sparta, that went furthest in the corporal culture of the two sexes, boys and girls went naked until the age of puberty, and participated in common in the exercises of the body, in games and in wrestling. The naked exposure of the human body, together with the natural treatment of natural things, had the advantage that sensuous excitement—to-day artificially cultivated by the separation of the sexes from early childhood—was then prevented. The corporal make-up of one sex, together with its distinctive organs, was no secret to the other. There, no play of equivocal words could arise. Nature was Nature. The one sex rejoiced at the beauty of the other. Mankind will have to return to Nature and to the natural intercourse of the sexes; it must cast off the now-ruling and unhealthy spiritual notions concerning man; it must do that by setting up methods of education that fit in with our own state of culture, and that may bring on the physical and mental regeneration of the race.