Id.... “I have urged on woman independence of man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another; but because in woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion which has cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other.... Woman, self-controlled, would never be absorbed by any relations; it would be only an experience to her as to man. It is a vulgar error that love, a love to woman, is her whole existence; she is also born for truth and love in their universal energy.”—Margaret Fuller Ossoli (“The Woman of the Nineteenth Century”).
Id.... Professor Alfred Russell Wallace has written an article, concerning part of which Mr. W. T. Stead rightly says: “It is a scientific reinforcement of the cause of the emancipation of women, and shows that progress of the cause of female enfranchisement is identified with the progress of humanity.”—(Review of Reviews, Vol. V., p. 177.)
Professor Wallace says:—
“When such social changes have been effected that no woman will be compelled, either by hunger, isolation, or social compulsion, to sell herself, whether in or out of wedlock, and when all women alike shall feel the refining influence of a true humanising education, of beautiful and elevating surroundings, and of a public opinion which shall be founded on the highest aspirations of their age and country, the result will be a form of human selection which will bring about a continuous advance in the average status of the race. Under such conditions, all who are deformed either in body or mind, though they may be able to lead happy and contented lives, will, as a rule, leave no children to inherit their deformity. Even now we find many women who never marry because they have never found the man of their ideal. When no woman will be compelled to marry for a bare living or for a comfortable home, those who remain unmarried from their own free choice will certainly increase, while many others, having no inducement to an early marriage, will wait till they meet with a partner who is really congenial to them.
“In such a reformed society the vicious man, the man of degraded taste or feeble intellect, will have little chance of finding a wife, and his bad qualities will die out with himself. The most perfect and beautiful in body and mind will, on the other hand, be most sought, and, therefore, be most likely to marry early, the less highly endowed later, and the least gifted in any way the latest of all, and this will be the case with both sexes.
“From this varying age of marriage, as Mr. Galton has shown, there will result a more rapid increase of the former than of the latter, and this cause continuing at work for successive generations will, at length, bring the average man to be the equal of those who are now among the more advanced of the race.”—“Human Progress, Past and Present” (Arena, Jan., 1892).
XLVII.
1.—“Nor blankly epicene ...”
“Bring up a boy and girl side by side, and educate them both for the same profession under the same masters, and a novelist who depicts character could yet weave a story out of the mental and emotional differences between them, which will cause them to look at life from totally opposite points of view.”—Mabel Collins (“On Woman’s Relation to the State”).
2.-“... sequence of that day.”