Take care! disciple of liberty, you have not the right to think and to wish in my place. I have, like you, an intellect and a free will, to which you are bound, by your principles, to pay sovereign respect. Now I forbid you to speak for any woman; I forbid you in the name of what you call the rights of the soul.
"You by no means deny," you say, "that, strictly speaking, a young woman can read everything, and inform herself of everything; can pass through all the ordeals to which the mind of man is subjected, and still remain pure. You only maintain," you add, "that her soul, withered by reading, palled by novels, living habitually on the stimulus of play-houses, on the aqua-fortis of criminal courts, will become, not corrupted, perhaps, but vulgar, common, trivial, like the curb-stone in the street. This curb-stone is a good stone; you have only to break it to see that it is white within. This does not hinder it from being sadly soiled outside, in every respect as dirty as the street gutter from which it has been splashed.
"Is this, madam, the ideal to which you lay claim for her who should remain the temple of man, the altar of his heart, whence he daily rekindles the flame of pure love?"
A truce to imagery and oratorical outbursts; none of us demand for woman any degradation whatever. There would be no need for us to demand what you censure, since it is thoroughly authorized and practised. I by no means wish to accuse you of bad faith, of want of reflection, and of too much moral tolerance; yet let us strip off your poetic mantle, and translate your thought into prose; the drapery will no longer make us forget the idea.
When instruction has been demanded for the people, has any one ever taken it into his head to fancy that the point in question was to make them read novels, to swell the attendance on criminal courts, and to multiply theatres?
No, you will say.
What authorizes you, then, to believe that those who demand a solid education for woman, are seeking that of of which you, on your part, do not dream for the people?
On the other hand, do you cultivate the intellect of man by novels, theatres, and spectacles of criminal courts? Is it in these things that his knowledge consists? No, you will say. What is there, then, in common between that which you censure, and the knowledge that we desire for woman; and why attribute to us absurd ideas, that you may have the pleasure of wrangling with phantoms?
All your fine ladies are nurtured on novels, plays, and judicial excitements; yet they are neither vulgar, nor trivial, nor comparable to curb-stones sullied by the mud of the streets; what you tell them, therefore, is no more true than kind.
But if you pay them doubtful compliments, which they do not deserve, you absolve them too easily, in turn. Listen to our principles, that you may not run the risk of appearing unjust with respect to us.