and activities.
We ask, in fine, for the application of the fundamental principles of Christianity and republicanism to this, as to all other questions of vital importance; and appealing to all who desire the progression and happiness of the whole race, we ask them, as magnanimous men and true women, to examine this subject in the spirit of a generous and candid investigation.
Rush Plumly said: Although institutions which recognize all the rights of all classes of the people, and allow scope for the growth and activity of every faculty, must, in their very nature, increase in power and permanence; yet, compared with the duration of things, the oldest nations and the best founded governments have had but an ephemeral existence, appearing, maturing, and decaying with startling rapidity and endless succession.
No form has been exempt from this national mortality. Theocracies, oligarchies, monarchies, despotisms, republics, have arisen, flourished, and vanished into history or tradition. So inevitable does the successive ruin appear, that we have incorporated into our religious faith the idea that limitation, conflict, and decay, rather than expansion, permanence, and peace, are inherent in all human governments, and, in despair man postpones his hope of national, as well as of individual stability and happiness, to some future existence.
For results so certain and so universal among all people, in every age, there must be some profound and radical cause which religion and philosophy have not discovered, or for which they have proposed no remedy. It is not sufficient to say that these are consequences of human imperfection; that we know; but whence arises the imperfection? It does not satisfy us to assert that they proceed from the depravity of man; how came he depraved? Nor is it more consoling to declare that all human institutions must change and perish. Why must they? Human institutions, if founded upon eternal principles, become divine, and may be immortal; it is not the human, but the inhuman institutions which perish; not humanity, but inhumanity which fills the earth with strife and blood.
No! there is behind and below all these imaginary causes, a real cause for the degeneracy of the race. It may be traced to the long continued disregard of the laws of God in relation to woman, and the retribution is worked out physiologically upon the whole nature of man, reaching every tissue of his body and every faculty of his mind.
It is a law of God, well understood, that whenever and wherever any community forcibly depresses any class of its people below the general level, it not only injures and degrades that class, but is itself injured, degraded, and deranged in exact proportion to the wrong it perpetrates. Whenever we crowd any portion of our fellow-beings into an abyss of ignorance and servitude, we are drawn irresistibly, by their weight, to the brink of the same gulf.
If this be the inevitable result of the oppression of an individual, or a class, how much more forcibly must it apply when one-half the world, the "mothers of the living," are made subject to systematic deprivation of rights and tyrannous restriction in the exercise of high and noble faculties.
I do not propose to detail the disabilities under which woman suffers. They have been ably depicted by women in this meeting. But I wish to indicate the breadth and basis of this reform, for the consideration of those people who suppose it to be a fractional and transient movement.
Whatever suffering or degradation woman is subjected to, by the depression of the whole sex below the level of society, reacts with frightful force upon man; who is thus compelled to compensate for the cruel and mistaken policy, which, in all time, has denied to her equal opportunities of education and development, closed to her those avenues to profit and progress open to him, ignored her in the Church and State as feeble and inferior, rejected her counsels, and derided her authority in the creation of those institutions of society to which not only she, but her children are to be subject; although, if there be any induction more striking than another it is this, that a child, who is the offspring of the physical union of man and woman, can only be truly educated and nurtured by institutions springing from the unity of mental and moral elements in the father and mother.
This universal ignoring of the feminine element pervades not only the politics, but the religion of every country on earth. Men worship, as their supreme God, only an embodiment of the masculine element—"Power," whether in Jove or Jehovah; and ever in the Christian Trinity or Unity, the same masculine ideal is maintained. Jesus did, indeed, recognize the feminine element in His emphatic declaration that "God is Love," but His professed followers have "not so learned Him," for they not only declare God to be a triune masculinity, but they have driven woman from the pulpit, and would dispute with her the place at the cross and the sepulchre.
The religions of antiquity permitted woman to be a priestess at the expense of wifehood and maternity, but our Christian Protestantism denies to her the mission of minister, even with that penalty. It is true the Catholic Church does recognize women among its divinities, and it might be a curious and instructive inquiry, how far that Church owes its perpetuity, despite its gigantic crimes and crushing despotism, to the recognition of "Mary the mother of God." In its effort to perpetuate the servitude of woman, as in other attempts to defend oppression and falsehood, society has suborned the handmaids of progress, Religion and Science, to justify its wickedness; the one to prove inferiority from her organism, the other to add the weight of its anathema against any effort at equality.
But Nature vindicates herself against the first, by presenting De Staël, Margaret Fuller, and others; and to the cavilling bigot it may be said that whoever declared that "man is the head of the woman," if he designed to justify the present interpretation of that expression, has forfeited all claim to the apostleship of a religion whose highest merit it is to equalize the people by elevating the oppressed. But Paul taught no such doctrine.
The result of all this circumscription of woman has been to enfeeble and misdirect her faculties, to weaken the influence of her nature upon society and especially upon her offspring. Driven from the thousand avenues to wealth and position open to man, denied access to the best institutions of learning, permitted to acquire only superficial accomplishments, she is ushered into society at an age when her brothers are preparing to enter colleges and halls of learning from which she is excluded, and thus undeveloped and comparatively helpless, her instincts vitiated and no freedom for her affinities, she is turned adrift to encounter obstacles for which she is unprepared, and in the severe conflict to barter her honor for subsistence; or if she escape that horrible contingency, to exchange her beauty or her services for a matrimonial establishment, and thus prepare to perpetuate human degeneracy.
There are many exceptions to this statement, but the statement is the rule. From these unequal and discordant relations, and the feeble and restricted influence of the mother, spring generations of children who are born constitutionally defective in the feminine qualities of gentleness, purity, and love; and the utter rejection of that element in the societary arrangements under which they grow to manhood, aggravates their inherited tendencies, until whole nations of warriors founding governments of blood have filled the earth, and war and rapine have not only become the occupation and the pastime of man, but have grown into his religion and become incarnate in the Deities he worships.
It is thus that the seeds of violence and vice are sown with the germs of the generations, and they spring to a frightful harvest in each succeeding growth of the race. Millions of human beings issue into life, pre-ordained—not in the theological, but in the physiological sense—to violence and crime, and they go forth to make their calling and election sure. From these the world recruits its armies, renews its tyrants, refills its slave-pens and its brothels, populates its prisons, alms-houses, and asylums. It is in vain to hope for other results while woman, upon whom, as "mother of the living," depends the progress of man, is denied any other than a limited and indirect influence in the fabric of society.
We may abolish slavery, remove intemperance, banish war and licentiousness, but they will have frightful reproduction in the elemental discord of our natures; for that which is "in us will be revealed." Man indicates his condition
