ccording to the principles of ideal justice. The
world-wise Goethe everywhere recognizes the presence and significance of
the feminine principle; and, after treating with tenderness and
reverence its frailest as well as its finest impersonations, lays the
seal of all attraction in the lap of the "eternal womanly."

Nearer at hand, and in the intimacy of personal intercourse, Margaret
found a noble friend to her cause.

"The late Dr. Channing, whose enlarged and religious nature shared every
onward impulse of his time, though his thoughts followed his wishes with
a deliberative caution which belonged to his habits and temperament, was
greatly interested in these expectations for women. He regarded them as
souls, each of which had a destiny of its own, incalculable to other
minds, and whose leading it must follow, guided by the light of a
private conscience."

She tells us that the Doctor's delicate and fastidious taste was not
shocked by Angelina Grimke's appearance in public, and that he fully
indorsed Mrs. Jameson's defence of her sex "in a way from which women
usually shrink, because, if they express themselves on such subjects
with sufficient force and clearness to do any good, they are exposed to
assaults whose vulgarity makes them painful."

Margaret ends her treatise with a synopsis of her humanitarian creed, of
which we can here give only enough to show its general scope and tenor.
Here is the substance of it, mostly in her own words:--

Man is a being of twofold relations,--to nature beneath and
intelligences above him. The earth is his school, God his object, life
and thought his means of attaining it.

The growth of man is twofold,--masculine and feminine. These terms, for
Margaret, represent other qualities, to wit, Energy and Harmony, Power
and Beauty, Intellect and Love.

These faculties belong to both sexes, yet the two are distinguished by
the preponderance of the opposing characteristics.

Were these opposites in perfect harmony, they would respond to and
complete each other.

Why does this harmony not prevail?

Because, as man came before woman, power before beauty, he kept his
ascendency, and enslaved her.

Woman in turn rose by her moral power, which a growing civilization
recognized.

Man became more just and kind, but failed to see that woman was half
himself, and that, by the laws of their common being, he could never
reach his true proportions while she remained shorn of hers. And s