as John
Stuart Mill, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and numerous others, have treated
this all-important question, which cannot be shirked by the race. True
reformers ask: What was the condition of the sex in the past? Look
down the revolving cycles and note. In ancient Egypt, woman in the
upper classes was almost the equal of man, and although, like
Cleopatra, she could wield the sceptre, yet in the lower her condition
was wretched; in Asia, a mere slave and object of Zenana lust; in
savagedom, a beast of burthen. In Rome and Greece, Shelley shall tell
the story:

"Among the ancient Greeks the male sex, one half of the
human race, received the highest cultivation and refinement;
whilst the other, so far as intellect is concerned, were
educated as slaves, and were raised but few degrees in all
that related to moral or intellectual excellence above the
condition of savages.... The Roman women held a higher
consideration in society, and were esteemed almost as the
equal partners with their husbands in the regulation of
domestic economy and the education of their children."

Regard the incidents of a Jewish wooing, in which the woman had no
voice, and of the marriage, the infernal punishments for adultery, and
the accounts of the seraglios of the Hebrew kings equalled only by
Turkish harems, and some of the passages in the inspired Book of
Numbers, for instance, in which the horrible truth is frequently too
evident, and only equalled by the fact that after lust had played out
its passion, unfortunate women, taken in captivity, could, by divine
command, be turned adrift to rot or starve. In Christian Feudalism we
find nothing much better. If I have read history correctly, and I may
be wrong--the upper-grade women in mediaeval Europe, who were adored,
not with love, but with lascivious and sensual worship, by Christian
knights and troubadours, and who, like criminals to the halter, were
forced, rarely with their own consent, into the arms of men they
disliked or had never seen, or were placed in conventual houses
against their wills. Of the lower-grade women, I need only offer one
example--and that is sufficient to show their awful degradation; the
French and German feudal lord had the right of _cuissage_, or, in
plain English, the embraces of his serf-retainer's bride on the
marriage night.

Shelley considered that in consequence of all this, men had forgotten
their duties to the ot