ar event. In the history
of your own people you have no doubt observed that the very thing
plotted, intrigued and labored for, has in accomplishment proved the
ruin of its projectors. You will remark this in the history I am about
to relate.

"Main ages ago this country was peopled by two races--male and female.
The male race were rulers in public and domestic life. Their supremacy
had come down from pre-historic time, when strength of muscle was the
only master. Woman was a beast of burden. She was regarded as inferior
to man, mentally as well as physically. This idea prevailed through
centuries of the earlier civilization, even after enlightenment had
brought to her a chivalrous regard from men. But this regard was
bestowed only upon the women of their own household, by the rich and
powerful. Those women who had not been fortunate enough to have been
born in such a sphere of life toiled early and late, in sorrow and
privation, for a mere pittance that was barely sufficient to keep the
flame of life from going out. Their labor was more arduous than men's,
and their wages lighter.

"The government consisted of an aristocracy, a fortunate few, who were
continually at strife with one another to gain supremacy of power, or an
acquisition of territory. Wars, famine and pestilence were of frequent
occurrence. Of the subjects, male and female, some had everything to
render life a pleasure, while others had nothing. Poverty, oppression
and wretchedness was the lot of the many. Power, wealth and luxury the
dower of the few.

"Children came into the world undesired even by those who were able to
rear them, and often after an attempt had been made to prevent their
coming alive. Consequently numbers of them were deformed, not only
physically, but mentally. Under these conditions life was a misery to
the larger part of the human race, and to end it by self-destruction was
taught by their religion to be a crime punishable with eternal torment
by quenchless fire.

"But a revolution was at hand. Stinted toil rose up, armed and wrathful,
against opulent oppression. The struggle was long and tragical, and was
waged with such rancor and desperate persistence by the
insurrectionists, that their women and children began to supply the
places vacated by fallen fathers, husbands and brothers. It ended in
victory for them. They demanded a form of government that should be the
property of all. It was granted, limiting its privileges to adu