174 WISCONSLN" ACADEMY SCIENCES, ARTS, AND LETTERS. 



The revulsion from all this, with co-ordinate power and privi- 

 lege, will most assuredly work to the debasement of female char- 

 acter, checked only by her natural superiority of instinctive virtue, 

 and by the increased security against temptation found in her en- 

 larged material independence. The tendency to this growth of 

 vice among men would also find restraint in their increased respect 

 for women, because of their independence, and in the elevation of 

 sentiment inspired by them through better culture and the conse- 

 quent ability to turn the excess of masculine passion into virtuous 

 and useful channels. 



Another powerful, and, it may be, more iuimediate check to 

 either the ordinary or increased licentiousness of men would be the 

 alarm seizing upon all but the most depraved circles of society, at 

 the spectacle of woman becoming the instrument of so appalling a 

 measure of retributive justice. Nor can it be doubted that this 

 spectacle would become a measure of extraordinary enlightenment 

 to him concerning the whole nature of the sexual passion and of 

 the non-sexual character of morality in exfenso. 



An increase of divorce legitimate to this state of things would 

 ere long be corrected by enabling women to enter upon marriage 

 more considerately than now; while marriage itself would be stead- 

 ily gaining in dignity and security, as the elevation and responsi- 

 bility of enfranchised women began to take effect upon the general 

 quality of men, as well. 



This movement, would, however, beyond all question, show itself 

 to have been a great and just moveuioit in the result of better 

 educated women. Through the independence of equality in edu- 

 cation, better women; and after that a better race of men, better 

 rearing, better society, better government, and a nobler civiliza- 

 otin. 



That women desire an equality with men to the end of entrance 

 upon public life, or of competing with them in the affairs of busi- 

 ness, is as far as possible from the truth. There is much apprehen- 

 sion as to the subversion of social order, while insisting upon obe- 

 dience to the law of nature in the parcelling out of duties and 

 relations between men and women; and yet the entire proceeding 

 of the civil structure of man in this regard is as if nature had fur- 

 nished no law not in need of the sanction of his enforcement. But 

 if there is one law of the intellectual constitution of sex more clearly 



