spoiling her
figure, but she surrenders herself to it because it promises
happiness. If she bears children it is by pure chance, and when they
are grown up she tries to conceal them.

These characteristics taken at random from among a thousand others are
not found amongst those beings whose hands are as black as those of
apes and their skin tanned like the ancient parchments of an _olim_;
whose complexion is burnt brown by the sun and whose neck is wrinkled
like that of a turkey; who are covered with rags; whose voice is
hoarse; whose intelligence is nil; who think of nothing but the bread
box, and who are incessantly bowed in toil towards the ground; who
dig; who harrow; who make hay, glean, gather in the harvest, knead the
bread and strip hemp; who, huddled among domestic beasts, infants and
men, dwell in holes and dens scarcely covered with thatch; to whom it
is of little importance from what source children rain down into their
homes. Their work it is to produce many and to deliver them to misery
and toil, and if their love is not like their labor in the fields it
is at least as much a work of chance.

Alas! if there are throughout the world multitudes of trades-women who
sit all day long between the cradle and the sugar-cask, farmers' wives
and daughters who milk the cows, unfortunate women who are employed
like beasts of burden in the manufactories, who all day long carry the
loaded basket, the hoe and the fish-crate, if unfortunately there
exist these common human beings to whom the life of the soul, the
benefits of education, the delicious tempests of the heart are an
unattainable heaven; and if Nature has decreed that they should have
coracoid processes and hyoid bones and thirty-two vertebrae, let them
remain for the physiologist classed with the ourang-outang. And here
we make no stipulations for the leisure class; for those who have the
time and the sense to fall in love; for the rich who have purchased
the right of indulging their passions; for the intellectual who have
conquered a monopoly of fads. Anathema on all those who do not live by
thought. We say Raca and fool to all those who are not ardent, young,
beautiful and passionate. This is the public expression of that secret
sentiment entertained by philanthropists who have learned to read and
can keep their own carriage. Among the nine millions of the
proscribed, the tax-gatherer, the magistrate, the law-maker and the
priest doubtless see living soul