808 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
Then, men, unwilling to submit to the hard conditions of labor, and 
seeing themselves stronger than women, began to make servants 
of the latter, and slavery commenced upon the earth. And as ty- 
rants never want good reasons to justify their misdeeds, they set 
the misfortune of the fall to the account of woman, and caused her 
to be cursed by the gods. 
The gods, made in the image of man, always go halves with the 
executioners in calumniating the victims ; they are always ready to 
cover the holy idleness of the adroit with the mantle of inviolability. 
Which does not prevent me from saying that since the fall of hu- 
manity has begun by the subjugation of woman, humanity will 
never rise but by her complete emancipation. 
But it was not enough to have thrown a whole sex into slavery. 
These slaves, too feeble, not sufficing to feed by their work the 
idleness of strong men, the latter coalesced to crush the weaker 
men ; they organized the caste, the caste of the idle^ the noble 
caste. They divided the world into two categories, the idlers and 
the laborers, the proprietors and the proletaries — the saints, elect 
of God, and the reprobates, the parias. They arrogated to them- 
selves the right to consume without producing, leaving to the disin- 
herited, to the conquered the right io produce without consuming. 
And they had priests and philosophers who, for the sake of 
sharing in their privileges of idleness, declared that slavery and the 
exploitation of the weaker by the stronger was the last word of the 
will of God, the only possible basis of order and society. And all 
who protested against the will of God expressed by those who con- 
stituted themselves its interpreters, were put to death without mer- 
cy as rebels to the divine law. Alas ! this fact still endures, al- 
though it commenced six thousand years ago; and the Arab and 
the savage warrior continue to sleep and to repose under the tent, 
while the woman slave extenuates herself in rude labors, and in a 
great country which every one may know, and which boasts of 
having emancipated all its children from the yoke of privilege, 
men are still born legislators by right of capital. 
Born law-maker, whoever owes the light of day to a speculator 
implicated in the embezzlement of bread-stuffs, to a gambler en- 
riched by frauds . . . Born subject of the law, but excluded from 
