asures of
the senses, there lay in that age the acknowledgment that the natural
impulses, implanted in every healthy and ripe human being, are entitled
to be satisfied. In so far there lay in the demonstration a victory of
vigorous nature over the asceticism of Christianity. On the other hand,
it must be noted that the recognition and satisfaction fell to the share
of only one sex, while the other sex, on the contrary, was treated as if
it could not and should not have the same impulses; the slightest
transgression of the laws of morality prescribed by man, was severely
punished. The narrow and limited horizon, within which moved the citizen
of the Middle Ages, caused him to adopt narrow and limited measures also
with respect to the position of woman. And, as a consequence of
continued oppression and peculiar education, woman herself has so
completely adapted herself to her master's habits and system of thought,
that she finds her condition natural and proper.

Do we not know that there have been millions of slaves who found
slavery natural, and never would have freed themselves, had their
liberators not risen from the midst of the class of the slave-holders?
Did not Prussian peasants, when, as a result of the Stein laws, they
were to be freed from serfdom, petition to be left as they were,
"because who was to take care of them when they fell sick?" And is it
not similarly with the modern Labor Movement? How many workingmen do not
allow themselves to be influenced and led without a will of their own?

The oppressed needs the stimulator and firer, because he lacks the
independence and faculty for initiative. It was so with the modern
proletarian movement; it is so also in the struggle for the emancipation
of woman, which is intimately connected with that of the proletariat.
Even in the instance of the comparatively favorably situated bourgeois
of old, noble and clerical advocates broke the way open for him to
conduct his battle for freedom.

However numerous the shortcomings of the Middle Ages, there was then a
healthy sensualism, that sprang from a rugged and happy native
disposition among the people, and that Christianity was unable to
suppress. The hypocritical prudery and bashfulness; the secret
lustfulness, prevalent to-day, that hesitates and balks at calling
things by their right name, and to speak about natural things in a
natural way;--all that was foreign to the Middle Ages. Neither was that
age familiar wit