The spirit-rapper; an autobiography
science and religion, as now organized, are false and mischievous,
because they are the product of man’s genius alone. I have said all the
flattering things I could to make him take up the cause of Woman’s
Rights, and he has only laughed at me.”
“You wrong me, fair and adorable Leila; woman reigns supreme now, and we
are slaves; what more can she ask?”
“She should be elevated to be the equal of man,” said Leila.
“Lowered, my Leila would say,” replied the young gentleman.
“And placed in the possession of the same political franchises, have the
right to vote at all elections, and be declared eligible to any and
every office political, civil, or military,” continued Leila, without
heeding the interruption.
“But that,” said Mr. Merton, “would be hardly fair to us men, and would
moreover be dangerous to republican liberty. Mademoiselle Leila would of
course be a candidate for the Assembly. All the young men would vote for
her, because they would secure her good graces, and all the old men
would do the same, in order to prove that they are not old, and have not
yet lost their sensibility to female loveliness and worth; she would be
elected unanimously. In the Assembly she would rise to propose some
measure, throw aside her veil, beam forth upon us with all her charms,
and for the same reasons all would support her. She would reign as a
despot, which, as a republican, I must protest against.”
“She might have rivals; all men do not see with the same eyes,” sagely
remarked a venerable spinster, with a dried and withered form and face,
puckering up her mouth, and endeavoring to look killing.”
“That is well thought of,” said Mr. Merton.
“Besides,” added Mr. Winslow, “the votes of the women would be as
numerous as those of the men, and might be thrown for a candidate of the
other sex.”
“And you may trust to the women themselves to see that no one of their
own sex has a monopoly of power,” added, caustically, Mr. Cotton.
“You are hard upon us women,” pleaded Priscilla. “Women have their
weaknesses as well as men theirs, but they can love and admire beauty in
their own sex, as much as they do ugliness in men. I do not suppose that
placing them on an equality in all respects with men will increase their
power as women, but it will increase their power as reasonable human
beings. I think woman would lose much of her peculiar power as woman
over man, and this I should by no means regret. I would break down the
tyranny of sex as I would that of caste or class. I would have men and
women so trained, that they could meet, converse, or act together as
simple human beings, without ever recurring, even in thought, to the
difference of sex.”
“That,” said the young worshipper of woman, “would be cruel. It would be
like spreading a pall over the sun, or extinguishing the lamp of life.
Even the garden of Eden
—— was a wild,
And man the hermit sighed, till woman smil’d.”
“As long as I remember my mother or my sister,” said Mr. Merton, “I
would never meet a woman, however high or however humble, without taking
note of the fact that she is a woman.”
“Things are best as God made them,” added Mr. Cotton. “Men and women
have each their peculiar character and sphere. Women would gain nothing
by exchanging the petticoat for the breeches, or men by exchanging the
breeches for the petticoat.”
“But I wish,” said Leila, poutingly, “to be treated as a reasonable
being, and that the young gentlemen who do me the honor to address me
would treat me as if I had common sense. I do not want compliments paid
to my hands and feet, my face, lips, nose, eyes, and eyebrows.”
“And yet,” said I, “my sweet Leila, they are well worth complimenting.”
She smiled, and seemed not displeased.
“I suspect,” remarked Mr. Cotton, with his Puritan slyness, “that the
young lady finds the affluence of such compliments more endurable than
she would their absence.”
“I do not deal much in compliments,” said Mr. Merton, “but I do not much
fancy persons who are always wise, and never open their mouths without
giving utterance to some grave maxim for the conduct of life. There is a
time to be silly as well as a time to be wise. Life is made up of little
things, and he is a sad moralist who has no leniency for trifles. I love
myself to look upon a pretty face, and find no great objection to those
pleasant nothings which are the current coin of well-bred conversation
between the sexes. Even a gallant speech, a happily-turned compliment,
when it brings no blush to the cheek of modesty, is quite endurable.”
“I thought you were a parson, Mr. Merton,” said Priscilla, “and am
surprised to find you so tolerant of what it is said your cloth
generally condemns.”
“The fair Priscilla may have mistaken my cloth. I am a man, and I hope a
gentleman. I love society, and find an exquisite charm in the social
intercourse of cultivated men and women. That charm would vanish were
they to meet and converse, not as men and women, gentlemen and ladies,
but as simple human beings. Could you carry out your doctrine, your sex
would, I fear, be the first to suffer from it.”
“Perhaps they would,” said Priscilla; “but it is woman’s lot to suffer,
and she was born to redeem the race by her private sorrows. She will not
shrink from the sacrifice. You need her at the polls, in the legislative
halls, in the executive chair, on the judge’s bench, as well as in the
saloon, to give purity and elevation to your affections,
disinterestedness and courage to your conduct.”
“Rather let her be present to infuse noble qualities into our hearts in
childhood, and to cherish and invigorate them in our manhood,” added Mr.
Merton. “Let her mission be by a sweet, quiet, and gentle influence to
form us from our infancy for lofty and heroic deeds, and let it be ours
to do them.”
“I do not like this discussion at all,” broke in Thomas Jefferson Andrew
Jackson Hobbs, a thorough-going radical, with an unshaved and unwashen
face, long, lank, uncombed hair, and a gray, patched frock coat, leather
pantaloons, a red waistcoat, and a red bandanna handkerchief tied round
his neck for a cravat. “The world can never be reformed by the
instrumentality of government, whether in the hands of man or woman. The
curse of the world is that it has been governed too much. That is the
best government that governs least, and a better is that which governs
none at all. We want no government, least of all a government made up of
female politicians and intriguers. There never yet was a great crime or
a great iniquity, but a woman had a hand in it. The devil, when he would
ruin mankind, always begins by seducing woman, and making her his
accomplice. We must get rid of all government, break down church and
state, sweep away religion and politics, and exterminate all priests and
politicians, whether in pantaloons or petticoats, in broadcloth or
homespun, and bring back that state of things which was in Judea, ‘when
there was no king in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own
eyes.’”
“Boldly said,” remarked Signor Giovanni Urbini, a leader of young Italy,
“but it is hardly wise. The people are not yet, especially in my
country, prepared for it. They have so long been the slaves of power,
and the tools of superstition, that they would be shocked at its bare
announcement. They must have their Madonnas, their San Carlos, their San
Felippos, and their capucin frati. But a thoroughgoing democratic
revolution is no doubt needed, and such a revolution will necessarily
result in a no less thorough and radical revolution in religion; but
this last we had better leave to come of itself. You cannot work with
purely negative ideas. You must have something positive, and that must
be the positive idea of the age. Kings, princes, nobles, priests,
religions in our times are at a discount, and the secret, silent, but
irresistible tendency is to bring up the people. Assert, then, boldly
everywhere people-king, people-pontiff, people-god. Fling out to the
breeze the virgin banner of the people. Go forth to war in the name of
the people, in the inspiration of the people, and always and everywhere
shout THE PEOPLE, THE PEOPLE. Break the fetters which now bind the
people, emancipate them from their present masters, assert their
supremacy, and establish their power, which of course in the last
analysis will be our power over them. They will then re-organize
society, religion, and politics, and every thing else, after the best
model, and in the way which will best meet our wishes.”
“I am decidedly opposed to my friend Urbini’s doctrine,” frankly
asserted M. Beaubien, from the sunny south of France, “I want no
king-people, and if I must be tyrannized over, I prefer it should be by
one man rather than the many-headed and capricious multitude. The evils
under which society groans is individualism, which now exerts itself in
universal competition, so highly prized by your foolish and stupid
political economists. These evils can be removed by no political or
religious revolution, neither by your Luthers nor your Robespierres.
They can be removed only by the pacific organization of labor, and the
arrangement of laborers in groups and series according to their special
tastes and capacities, on the newly-discovered principle that
‘attractions are proportional to destiny.’”
“A better plan,” suggested M. Icarie, also from la belle France, “is to
abolish all private property, all private households, industry, and
economy, and have the whole community supported, lodged, fed, clothed,
feasted or nursed, and transported from place to place, from house to
house, at the public expense.”
“Admirable,” interposed Mr. Cotton, “but who will support the public,
and whence will the public draw its funds?”
“Singular questions,” replied M. Icarie. “The public will support
itself, and draw the necessary funds from the public treasury, as a
matter of course.”
“And where does the treasury get them?” asked, with a sneer, M. Le
Prohne, a native of the ancient Dauphiny, who towered head and shoulders
above all the rest. “All your schemes are idle and absurd; property is
robbery; abolish it, and all distinction between _thine_ and _mine_, and
establish a grand People’s Bank, and give each one an equal credit on
its books.”
“And who,” sarcastically remarked M. Icarie, “will take care of the
Bank, and be responsible for its managers, or see that the drafts of
individuals are duly honored?”
“Why not,” I asked in my enthusiasm, “make an equal division of property
among all the members of the community?”
“That would do very well for a start,” suggested Mr. Cotton, “but he was
afraid that come Saturday night, a good many would demand, like the
sailor, that the property be divided again, as they no longer retained
their proportion.”
This produced a smile, and as it was late, the company broke up and
departed. Those who had had an opportunity of bringing forward their
views were very much edified; others who had been obliged to listen, or
to keep back their own projects, thought the party exceedingly dull, and
could not help thinking that the evening had been spent very
unprofitably.
There were, indeed, persons there with plans of reform as wise, as deep,
and as practicable as those I have taken notice of, and I owe an apology
to their authors for my omissions. These omissions are the result of no
ill feeling, and of no intentional neglect; and I certainly would repair
them, but as I am pressed for time, and am not writing a history of
reformers and projected reforms in a thousand volumes in-folio, the
thing is absolutely out of the question. Let it suffice for me to say,
that I have by me still some thousand and one of these projects, all of