CONVENTIONAL FALLACIES. 419 



To admire the unselfish character individually, and refuse to adopt 

 those measures that would make it the character of society generally, 

 is like preferring to walk by the gleam of occasional light, instead of 

 the full-orbed glory of day. 



The world, with all its boasting, is scarcely out of swaddling- 

 clothes, and has little notion of throwing off the prejudices in which 

 it has been nursed. Among its fallacies, can any be more gross than 

 the principle on which it awards superiority ? The machinist and 

 mechanic, who are the principal organs of human greatness, are, for- 

 sooth, of the inferior class ; while the monarch and his court minions, 

 wrapped up in the chrysalis of pomp, like insects in the pupa 

 state, are of the superior class ! Woman, whose soul is " as fine an 

 emanation from the great fountain of spirit as that of man," who has 

 higher responsibilities, more important duties in the world, and pays 

 a heavier tribute to it, is the inferior sex ! 



It is not the unshrinking support of burdens for the common 

 weal it is not the laborious discharge of functions for the common 

 good but it is to exemption from all duties or endeavours for the be- 

 nefit of the human race, to which society, by an insane inversion of 

 right reason, has awarded superiority. All, save the mere idly luxu- 

 rious, may do good service to mankind. In the great moral arch, 

 men and women, and all the varieties of men and women, are essen- 

 tial : but the existing key- stone of that arch is a mistake; and till it 

 is .rectified, the great structure of human happiness cannot approach 

 to perfectness or permanence : it will continue to have a fatal bias, 

 because it has a bad base. In process of time, intelligence will 

 trample patents of nobility beneath its feet coronets will crumble 

 by common consent as the dust they now dignify will, by common 

 necessity as soon as society is sufficiently advanced to perceive that 

 it is to moral attributes and practical power, that the award of supe- 

 riority properly and alone belongs. 



The stream of knowledge, contrary to all hydraulic law, is flowing 

 upwards. It has not come from the high places (so called) down 

 upon the people ; it is running up from the people, and will bear 

 them along with it. The high and the low, as they are by conven- 

 tional usage styled, or the few and the many, as they may more pro- 

 perly be termed, will change places ; for it will hereafter be as im- 

 possible to prevent true greatness from rising to its due elevation in 

 the social scale, as to keep the finer portion of air from rising above 

 the denser atmosphere : then society will be cumbered with no more 

 lords and ladies, nor its records branded with those histories of un- 

 valued worth, and unavailing talent, that now fill up the melancholy 

 chronicles of daily calamity. 



AN OLD WOMAN. 



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