The past is burnt out, with a residue of but little value except as a warning. The future is not ours, but of the universe with its hidden and irrevocable destiny. The present belongs to us, and it is our creed to be happy in its possession. We could have sown fears as you have, and could have been as overwhelmed with their multiplied terrors. We could have invented a circumstantial paradise like yours, with its pathway of extinguished temporal hopes, and its discouragements of the noblest ambitions to build out of the materials in sight; but to what purpose except an unworthy one? The present is ours. Our field is among the living things which surround us. The most of life to us is its possibilities of happiness, and the opportunities it affords for the enjoyment of our religious impulses to serve the Deity in advancing ourselves and our society toward that state of perfection to which under the supreme intelligence all things are seen to tend.
CHAPTER XII.
A notable condition of your society compared with ours is the tardy advance of your women from that complete subjection to men which existed in your primary state. It is not surprising that in your present stage of progress the males of your race should continue to usurp many of the privileges which came to them as an inheritance from a savage and brutal ancestry of comparatively recent existence, and your gradual awakening to a sense of justice in that direction is one of the many evidences that you are moving along on the lines marked out for you by the divine law of evolution in thought.
We have found certain active qualities of mind, predominating everywhere in women, indispensable to a better progress in social advancement, and great things have been wrought to us by our present absolute equality of the sexes. The full value of women as factors in social progress is not known, nor even suspected by you, because you have never witnessed the experiment of a complete withdrawal of those restrictions which hold them in subjection; yet, it is a fact that in what are truly the noblest advances in humanity, they are your superiors. They have left further behind them the brutalisms of the past, are deeper touched with your inhumanities, and will go further to banish them than your men.
Your estimate of the mental capacity of women is singularly erroneous. The cropping out occasionally of their intellectual achievements, and the marked increase of such with the multiplication of opportunities, must have hinted to you that their silence, and apparent inferiority in the higher mental efforts, were alone due to their long period of subordination, during which the usages of your society have discouraged any attempts to enter the field as competitors with men. In the full swing of opportunity and encouragement allowed them by us, they have raised themselves to a very high plane, especially in literature, poetry and art. We owe to them many of our masterpieces in these attainments, and their aptitude for study and investigation is shown in the even place they hold with us in science and the professions. Those feminine qualities of mind which are described by you as heart, sympathy, sentiment and emotion, and which are generally considered by you as out of place in affairs of state, are the very ones of which you have the greatest need in legislation. It is principally through the feelings mentioned that divine impulses are expressed, and yet that part of yourselves where they most prevail are excluded from your councils.
A model of all that is best in your governments is to be found no where except within the family. The ready helpfulness and equal attention to the welfare of one another within its precincts, extended into the motives and aims of your public policies, embrace everything necessary to a perfect government; yet, you have selected out of the family for the sole direction of your public affairs its hardest and most selfish part, its selfishness intensified in its dealings with society beyond the confines of home, by those absorbing paternal responsibilities—in great measure due to the subordination of women—which in many ways interfere with efforts for the good of the whole.
From the nature of things your men are more easily overcome by evil political forces than your women would be. The latter, being more closely allied to the interests of the family, in its moral training, and less willing to sacrifice the benefit of example, are consequently less corruptible than men. Women have a greater natural affinity for virtue than men, more unselfishness and a larger concern for the moral welfare of mankind, exhibited in their more earnest support of religion.
With the enfranchisement of women the humanities of life would enter more largely into your politics. You have proofs of this in the few local instances where they have been granted suffrage rights. The desirable family methods and sentiments, of which they are better exponents than men, have never failed to come to the surface as indications of their presence. They have invariably shown a greater inclination than men to consider the welfare of persons in legislation as against the welfare alone of property, which has to the present so monopolized and corrupted your politics. Your legislation in the hands of men alone has accomplished but little in alleviating the distresses of humanity. The cold and calculating hand of speculation, which invests only to call back its capital with high usury, has always held your law making as a ready instrument for its purposes, and without loftier views, your governments will continue to miss their opportunities for benefitting mankind. By the admission of women the higher sentiments would sooner find a place. It would be the first step in bringing natural religion and politics together. The present irrational state of your spiritual beliefs retards the adoption of a moral code in your systems of government. With you, the State is led to care for nothing in the interest of morality, except a punishment of its infractions. It ignores, as no part of its duties, all incentives to goodness, and in dealing with crime the service of its prevention, in any other way than punishment, is not considered, principally because other departments of society have assumed for ages the public control and promotion of the virtues.