January 1st, 1893.

⁂ The courtesy of corroborations or elucidations (confidential or otherwise) of the subject-matter of these Notes is invited by the Author (care of Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy, Buxton House, Congleton), with a view to a possible fuller edition.

INDICES, &c.

AUTHORITIES OR REFERENCES IN NOTES

INDEX TO NOTES.

[By the law of England a girl is still marriageable at twelve and a boy at fourteen years of age; though the “age of consent” to intercourse not thus sanctioned has been recently raised to sixteen years in the case of girls. In the above matters, and notably in that of the marriageable age, England remains barbarously below most modern legislatures, and is indeed in the disgraceful condition of being not even on a level with China, in which country—as Mr. Byrant Barrett points out, in his Introductory Discourse to the “Code Napoléon,” p. 66—“In females, it would appear, consummation is not allowable before twelve,” while “the age for marriage in males is twenty complete.” China and England are but slightly in advance of ancient India, where, according to the precepts of Manu, as Mr. Barrett further shows, (p. 30), “The male of 24 years should marry the girl of 8 years of age; the male of 30 the female of 12” (Ordinances of Manu, ch. 9, sec. 94). Is not such conduct as this sufficient to involve as inevitable consequences “unripe maternity and untimely birth,” together with all their dire inherited miseries?]

“But I hear you indignantly reject the boon of equality with such creatures as men now are. With you I would equally elevate both sexes. Really enlightened women, disdaining equally the submissive tricks of the slave and the caprices of the despot, breathing freely only in the air of the esteem of equals, and of mutual, unbought, uncommanded, affection, would find it difficult to meet with associates worthy of them in men as now formed, full of ignorance and vanity, priding themselves on a sexual superiority, entirely independent of any merit, any superior qualities, or pretentions to them, claiming respect from the strength of their arm, and the lordly faculty of producing beards attached by nature to their chins! No: unworthy of, as incapable of appreciating, the delight of the society of such women, are the great majority of the existing race of men. The pleasures of mere animal appetite, the pleasures of commanding (the prettier and more helpless the slave, the greater these pleasures of the brute), are the only pleasures which the majority of men seek from women, are the only pleasures which their education and the hypocritical system of morals, with which they have been necessarily imbued, permit them to expect.... To wish for the enjoyment of the higher pleasures of sympathy and communication of knowledge between the sexes, heightened by that mutual grace and glow, that decorum and mutual respect, to which the feeling of perfect, unrestrained equality in the intercourse gives birth, a man must have heard of such pleasures, must be able to conceive them, and must have an organisation from nature or education, or both, capable of receiving delight from them when presented to him. To enjoy these pleasures, to which their other pleasures, a few excepted, are but the play of children or brutes, the bulk of men want a sixth sense; they want the capacity of feeling them, and of believing that such things are in nature to be found. A mole cannot enjoy the “beauties and glories” of the visible world; nor can brute men enjoy the intellectual and sympathetic pleasures of equal intercourse with women, such as some are, such as all might be. Real and comprehensive knowledge, physical and moral, equally and impartially given by education, and by all other means to both sexes, is the key to such higher enjoyments....