"Governments which derive their institutions from the existence of circumstances of barbarism and violence, with some rare exceptions, perhaps, are bloody in proportion as they are despotic, and form the manners of their subjects to a sympathy with their own spirit."
In England, as in many other countries, capital punishment is now only employed on conviction of murder or high treason. In Spain and Italy it was totally abolished, on the foundation of their young republics. Thus have the labors of Shelley, and other reformers for the good of humanity, aided to extinguish crime made law.
Cruelty to animals was another reform agitated by Shelley. His love for the animal kingdom and hatred of blood-shedding, was so great, that he personally carried the passion to such an extent as to become a vegetarian, and endeavored to induce others to be the same, in an admirable argument of some length in the notes to "Queen Mab."
The subject of the Rights of Women is approached and expatiated on, perhaps learnedly, by individuals utterly incompetent to deal with the question. Such persons, frequently armed with Sunday-school platitudes, believing in the inferiority of women, consequent on the supposed fall, and doubtless with heads paved with good intentions, as a certain place is said to be, do more harm than good to the cause. This is not wanted, and is worse than useless. To found a real republic on a solid basis, it can be legislated for only by removing the ancient landmarks by a gradual process, and coming face to face with a new order of things, without bias or prejudice borrowed from the past. Thus that noble woman, Mary Wolstonecraft, as well as John Stuart Mill, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and numerous others, have treated this all-important question, which cannot be shirked by the race. True reformers ask: What was the condition of the sex in the past? Look down the revolving cycles and note. In ancient Egypt, woman in the upper classes was almost the equal of man, and although, like Cleopatra, she could wield the sceptre, yet in the lower her condition was wretched; in Asia, a mere slave and object of Zenana lust; in savagedom, a beast of burthen. In Rome and Greece, Shelley shall tell the story:
"Among the ancient Greeks the male sex, one half of the human race, received the highest cultivation and refinement; whilst the other, so far as intellect is concerned, were educated as slaves, and were raised but few degrees in all that related to moral or intellectual excellence above the condition of savages.... The Roman women held a higher consideration in society, and were esteemed almost as the equal partners with their husbands in the regulation of domestic economy and the education of their children."
Regard the incidents of a Jewish wooing, in which the woman had no voice, and of the marriage, the infernal punishments for adultery, and the accounts of the seraglios of the Hebrew kings equalled only by Turkish harems, and some of the passages in the inspired Book of Numbers, for instance, in which the horrible truth is frequently too evident, and only equalled by the fact that after lust had played out its passion, unfortunate women, taken in captivity, could, by divine command, be turned adrift to rot or starve. In Christian Feudalism we find nothing much better. If I have read history correctly, and I may be wrong—the upper-grade women in mediæval Europe, who were adored, not with love, but with lascivious and sensual worship, by Christian knights and troubadours, and who, like criminals to the halter, were forced, rarely with their own consent, into the arms of men they disliked or had never seen, or were placed in conventual houses against their wills. Of the lower-grade women, I need only offer one example—and that is sufficient to show their awful degradation; the French and German feudal lord had the right of cuissage, or, in plain English, the embraces of his serf-retainer's bride on the marriage night.
Shelley considered that in consequence of all this, men had forgotten their duties to the other sex, and that even at the time at which he lived woman was still in great social bondage, improperly educated, tied down by restrictions, and refused participation in the higher positions of labor. He called not in vain, against the inequality of the sexes, and asserted that woman's position must and should be altered by forgetting the tyranny of the past, and, be determined, for the good of the future.
We should be rejoiced that eloquent exponents of the abominations of former ages, the evils of the present, and the proper position of the future, are now hard at work. The "Women's Rights" party is up teaching men their duties on every continent; in distant India, the Brahmo Somaj is battling, not vainly, against the horrors of the Zenana, and in conservative England, which has been stormed, and the forlorn hope is now taking possession of the citadel; everywhere it is the same. Yes, woman, thanks to Shelley and the reformers, is about to be emancipated and free; free to earn her living, how, where, and when she likes; the equal of man, who shall no longer play such fantastic tricks as he did in the past, in proof of his dignity and superiority. The fourth of July is not long past and gone; I trust that in the dim vista of the future, our descendants will keep a national holiday, or a day to be set apart on which shall be celebrated the "Declaration of the Independence of Women," and then, perhaps, Shelley's description of woman in the "Episychidion" will be more apparent:
"Seraph of heaven! too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath the radiant form of woman
All that is unsupportable in thee,
Of light, and love, and immortality."