"This is the question.
"On the subject of woman, our civil law is a model of absurd contradictions. According to the Roman law, woman lived perpetually under tutelage; in this system of legislation, everything was at least in perfect harmony; woman was always a minor. We, on our part, declare her in a multitude of cases to be free as man. She is no longer under general or fictitious tutelage; her age of majority is fixed; she is competent to inherit in her own right; she inherits in equal proportion; she controls and disposes of her property; more than this, in the system of communion of goods between husband and wife, we admit the separation of property. But let the marriage bond itself be in question, in which wealth is no longer at stake, but ourselves and our mothers, ourselves and our sisters, ourselves and our daughters; then we are found intractable in our laws; we no longer admit equality; we require woman to declare herself our inferior and servant, and to swear obedience to us.
"Truly we cling more to money than to love; we have more consideration for money-bags than for human dignity; for we emancipate women as soon as they become freeholders; but as soon as they become wives the law declares them our inferiors. Here notwithstanding, that bond is in question in which the equality of man and woman is most evident; that bond in which this equality breaks forth, as it were; that bond in which it is so necessary to proclaim that without equality, the bond itself exists no longer. Yet, by an absurd contradiction, our civil law chooses this moment to proclaim the inferiority of woman; it condemns her to obedience, makes her take a false oath, and takes advantage of love to make it outrage itself.
"I have no doubt that, to future ages, the characteristic symbol of our moral condition will be that article of our laws which sanctions in set terms inequality in love. It will be said of us: they had so little comprehension of justice, that they did not comprehend love which is justice in even its holiest type; they had so little comprehension of love, that they did not even admit justice in it; and that in their written law, their Code, the form of marriage, the only sacrament of which they yet had any idea, instead of sanctioning equality, sanctions inequality; instead of union, disunion; instead of the love that equalizes and identifies its objects, some contradictory and monstrous relation, founded at the same time upon identity, and upon inferiority and slavery. Yes, like those forms of the law of the Twelve Tables, that we quote now to prove the barbarity of the ancient Romans and their ignorance of justice, this article of our Code will be some day cited to characterize our grossness and ignorance, for the absence of an elevated notion of justice is as marked in it as is the absence of an elevated notion of love.
"Thence follows everything relative to the condition of woman; or rather, everything is connected with this point; for will we respect the equality of woman as a human being when we are senseless enough to deny her this quality as a wife? Is woman to-day, in so far as a human being, really treated as the equal of man? I will not enter upon this broad subject. I confine myself to a single question; what education do women receive? You treat them as you treat the people. To these too you leave the old religion that fits us no longer. They are children kept as long as possible in swaddling clothes, as though this were not the true way to deform them, to destroy at once the rectitude of their mind and the candor of their soul. Besides, what does Society do for them? To what new careers does she give them access? Yet, notwithstanding, it is evident to every thinking mind that our arts, our sciences, our manufactures will make as much new progress when women are called to take a part in them, as they did a few years ago, when they were opened to the serfs. You complain of the want and wretchedness that weighs down your systems of society; abolish the castes that are still subsisting; abolish the caste in which you hold immured the half of the human race."
These few pages, my readers, give you the compass of the sentiments of the St. Simonians, both orthodox and dissenters, and justify the sympathy entertained by women who have attained majority for those who have so ardently pleaded their cause.
FUSIONISTS.
Louis de Tourreil, the revealer of Fusionism, is a man whom it is impossible to behold without sympathy or to hear without pleasure; he is kindly, he speaks well, and his ideas are most logically deduced; his principles once admitted, one is constrained to follow him to the end.
Tourreil expresses himself in the Revue Philosophique of May, 1856, on the subject of woman and her rights, as follows:
"Nature is reduced to three great co-eternal principles or productive agents of all things. These principles are: