Appendix A.
1. "For a species increases or decreases in numbers, widens or contracts
its habitat, migrates or remains stationary, _continues an old mode
of life or falls into a new one_, under the combined influence of its
intrinsic nature _and the environing_ actions, inorganic and organic.
"Beginning with the extrinsic factors, we see that from the outset
several kinds of them are variously operative. They need but barely
ennumerating. We have climate, hot, cold, or temperate, moist or dry,
constant or variable. We have surface, much or little of which is
available, and the available part of which is fertile in greater or
less degree; and we have configuration of surface, as uniform or
multiform.... _On these sets of conditions, inorganic and organic,
characterizing the environment, primarily depends the possibility of
social evolution_."--Spencer, "Principles of Sociology," vol. 1, p. 10.
2. "These considerations clearly prove that of the _two primary causes
of civilization, the fertility of the soil_ is the one which in the
ancient world exercised most influence. But in European civilization,
_the other great cause_, that is to say, _climate_, has been the most
powerful.
"Owing to circumstances which I shall presently state, the only progress
which is really effective depends, not upon the bounty of nature, but
upon the _energy of man_. Therefore it is, that the civilization of
Europe, which, in its earliest stage, was governed by _climate_, has
shown a capacity of development unknown to those civilizations which
were originated by _soil_."--Buckle, "History of Civilization," vol. 1,
p. 36--37.*
* I wish to state here that I had never read the above from
Buckle, nor had I seen anywhere a statement so like my own,
at the time mine was written. I read this for the first time
while reading the proofs of this chapter. So much for what
may appear plagiarism.--H. H. Q,
Appendix B.
1. "Napoleon himself was indifferent to Christianity, but he saw that
the clergy were friends of despotism."--Buckle.
2. "Thus it is that a careful survey of history will prove that the
Reformation made the most progress not in those countries where the
people were most enlightened, but in those countries where, from
political causes, the clergy were least able to withstand the
people."--Buckle.
3. "Christian civilization in the twentieth century of its existence,
degrades its women to labor fit only for beasts of the field; harnessing
them with dogs to do the most menial labors; it drags them below even
this, holding their womanhood up to sale, _putting both Church and State
sanction_ upon their moral death; which, in some places, as in the city
of Berlin, so far recognizes the sale of women's bodies for the vilest
purposes _as part of the Christian religion, that license for this life
is refused until they have partaken of the Sacrament_; and demands
of the '10,000 licensed women of the town' of the city of Hamburg,
certificates showing that they regularly attend church and also partake
of the sacrament."--Gage.
Even a lower depth than this is reached in England, France, Italy,
Switzerland, and Germany, and nearly every country of Europe, says the
same writer, "a system of morality which declares 'the necessity' of
woman's degradation, and annually sends tens of thousands down to a
death from which society grants no resurrection."--Gage.
Appendix C.
1. "Sappho flourished b. c. 600, and a little later; and so highly did
Plato value her intellectual, as well as her imaginative endowments,
that he assigned her the honors of sage as well as poet; and familiarly
entitled her the 'tenth muse'"--Buckle,
2. "Wilkinson says among _no_ ancient people had women such influence
and liberty as among the ancient Egyptians."--Buckle.
3. "The Americans have in the treatment of women fallen below, not only
their own democratic principles, but the practice of some parts of the
Old World."--Harriet Martineau.
4. "Mr. F. Newman denies that Christianity has improved the position of
women; and he observes that, 'with Paul, the _sole_ reason for marriage
is, that a man may, without sin, vent his sensual desires. He teaches
that, _but_ for this object, it would be better not to marry;' and he
takes no notice of the _social_ pleasures of marriage. Newman says: 'In
short, only in countries where Germanic sentiment has taken root do we
see marks of any elevation of the female sex superior to that of Pagan
antiquity.'"--Buckle.
5. "Female voices are never heard in the Russian churches; their
place is supplied by boys; women do not yet stand high enough in the
estimation of the churches.... to be permitted to sing the praises of
God in the presence of men."--Kohl.
6. "Christianity diminished the influence of women."--Neander, "Hist, of
the Church."
Appendix D.
Within the reign of the present sovereign Mrs. Gage tells us of a young
girl being ordered by the Petty Sessions Bench back to the "service" of
a landlord, from whom she had run away because such service meant the
sacrifice of her honor. She refused to go _and was put in jail_.
Appendix E.
1. "Women were taught by the Church and State alike, that the Feudal
Lord or Seigneur had a right to them, not only against themselves, but
as against any claim of husband or father. The law known as _Marchetta_,
or Marquette, compelled newly-married women to a most dishonorable
servitude. They were regarded as the rightful prey of the Feudal Lord
from one to three days after their marriage, and from this custom, the
oldest son of the serf was held as the son of the lord, 'as perchance
it was he who begat him.' From this nefarious degradation of woman, the
custom of Borough-English arose, in which the youngest son became the
heir.... France, Germany, Prussia, England, Scotland, _and all
Christian countries_ where feudalism existed, held to the enforcement of
Marquette. The lord deemed this right as fully his as he did the claim
to half the crops of the land, or to half the wool of the sheep. More
than one reign of terror arose in France from the enforcement of this
law, and the uprisings of the peasantry over Europe during the _twelfth
century_, and the fierce Jacquerie, or Peasant Wars, of the _fourteenth
century_ in France owed their origin, among other causes, to the
enforcement of these claims by the lords upon the newly-married wife.
The edicts of Marly transplanted that claim to America when Canada was
under the control of France. To persons not conversant with the history
of feudalism, and of the Church for the first fifteen hundred years of
its existence, it will seem impossible that such foulness could ever
have been part of Christian civilization. That the crimes they have been
trained to consider the worst forms of heathendom could have existed
in Christian Europe, _upheld by both Church and State_ for more than a
thousand five hundred years, will strike most people with incredulity.
Such, however, is the truth; we can but admit well-attested facts of
history, how severe a blow soever they strike our preconceived beliefs.
"Marquette was claimed by the Lords Spiritual,* as well as by the
Lords Temporal. _The Church indeed, was the bulwark of this base feudal
claim_. With the power of penance and excommunication in its grasp,
this demand could neither have originated nor been sustained unless
sanctioned by the Church.... These customs of feudalism were the customs
of Christianity during many centuries. (One of the Earls of Crawford,
known as the 'Earl Brant,' in the _sixteenth_ century, was probably
among the last who openly claimed by right the literal translation of
_droit de Jambage_.) These infamous outrages upon woman were enforced
under Christian law by both Church and State.
* "In days to come people will be slow to believe that the
law among _Christian nations went beyond anything decreed_
concerning the olden slavery; that it wrote down as an
actual right the most grievous outrage that could ever wound
_man's_ heart. The Lords Spiritual (clergy) had this right
no less than the Lords Temporal. The _parson_, being a lord,
_expressly claimed the first fruits of the bride, but was
willing to sell_ his right to the husband. The Courts of
Berne openly maintain that this right grew up naturally."--
Michelet, "La Sorcerie," p.62
"The degradation of the _husband_ at this infringement of the lord
spiritual and temporal upon his marital right, has been pictured by many
writers, but history has been quite silent upon the despair and shame
of the wife. No hope appeared for woman anywhere. The Church....
dragged her to the lowest depths, through the vileness of its priestly
customs.... We who talk of the burning of wives upon the funeral pyres
of husbands in India, may well turn our eyes to the records of Christian
countries."--Matilda Joslyn Gage in "Woman, Church, and State."
2. From this point Mrs. Gage calls attention to the various efforts to
throw off this degrading custom. The women held meetings at night, and
among other things travestied the celebration of Mass and other Church
customs; but the end and aim of these meetings being a protest and
rebellion against Marquette, the clergy called those who took part in
them "witches;"* and then and there began the persecution which the
Church carried on against women under this disguise (under Catholic and
Protestant rule alike), which extended down to the latter part of the
last century, with its list of horrors and indignities extending over
all Christian countries and blossoming in all their vigor in our
own eastern States, upheld by Luther, John Wesley, and Baxter, who
unfortunately had not at that time entered into the everlasting rest
of the Saints. And, true to these noble and wise leaders, the Churches
which they founded are to-day expressing the same sentiments (in
principle) in regard to the honor and dignity and position of woman.
The arguments of the Rev. Dr. Craven, the prosecutor in the famous
Presbyterian trial of 1876, which are given by Mrs. Gage, together with
numerous other similar ones, fully establish the fact that woman is to
the Church what she always was--_so far as secular law will permit._ And
numerous instances (such as the Buckley exhibition at the last Methodist
Conference, in which he was sustained by the Conference) prove that they
have learned nothing since 1876.
* "There are few superstitions which have been so universal
as a belief in witchcraft. The severe theology of paganism
despised the wretched superstition, which has been greedily
believed by millions of Christians."--Buckle.
3. I wish I might copy here the sermon to women which the Rev.
Knox-Little, the well-known High-Church clergyman of England, preached
when in this country in 1880, in which he said, "There is no crime which
a man can commit which justifies his wife in leaving him. It is her duty
to subject herself to him always, and no crime that he can commit can
justify her lack of obedience." Although a little balder in statement
than are most utterances of orthodox clergymen in this age, yet in
sentiment and in the reason given for it the echo of "Amen" comes from
every pulpit where a believer in original sin, vicarious atonement,
or the inspiration of the Bible has a representative and a voice. If
self-respect or honor is ever to be the lot of woman, it will not be
until her foot is on the neck of orthodoxy, and when the Bible ranks
where it belongs in the field of literature.
Appendix F.
1. "The French government, about the middle of the eighteenth century,
seems to have reached the maturity of its wickedness, allowing if not
instigating religious persecutions of so infamous a nature that they
would not be believed if they were not attested by documents of the
courts in which the sentences were passed."--Buckle.
2. Of Louis XV., the eminently Christian king of France, Buckle says:
"His harem cost more than 100,000,000 francs, and was composed of
_little girls_. He was constantly drunk," and "turned out his own
illegitimate children to prostitute themselves."
3. "It will hardly be believed that, when sulphuric ether was first
used to lessen the pains of childbirth, it was objected to as 'a profane
attempt to abrogate the primeval curse pronounced upon woman....' The
injury which the theological principle has done to the world is immense.
It has prevented men from studying the laws of nature."--Buckle.
Appendix G.
1. "The narrow range of their sympathies [the clergy's], and the
intellectual servitude they have accepted, render them _peculiarly
unfitted_ for the office of educating the young, which they so
persistently claim, and which, _to the great misfortune of the world_,
they were long permitted to monopolize.... The almost complete omission
from female education of those studies which most discipline and
strengthen the intellect, increases the difference, while at the
same time it has been usually made a main object to imbue them with a
passionate faith in traditional opinions, and to preserve them from
all contact with opposing views. But contracted knowledge and imperfect
sympathy are not the sole fruits of this education. It has always been
the peculiarity of a certain kind of theological teaching, that it
-inverts all the normal principles of judgment and absolutely destroys
intellectual diffidence. On other subjects we find if not a respect for
honest conviction, at least some sense of the amount of knowledge
that is requisite to entitle men to express an opinion on grave
controversies. A complete ignorance of the subject-matter of a dispute
restrains the confidence of dogmatism; and an ignorant person who is
aware that, by much reading and thinking in spheres of which he has
himself no knowledge, his educated neighbor has modified or rejected
opinions which that ignorant person had been taught, will, at least
if he is a man of sense or modesty, abstain from compassionating the
benighted condition of his more instructed friend. But on theological
questions this has never been so.
"Unfaltering belief being taught as the first of duties, and all doubt
being usually stigmatized as criminal or damnable, a state of mind is
formed to which we find no parallel in other fields. Many men and most
women, though completely ignorant of the very rudiments of biblical
criticism, historical research, or scientific discoveries, though they
have never read a single page, or Understood a single proposition of
the writings of those whom they condemn, and have absolutely no rational
knowledge either of the arguments by which their faith is defended, or
of those by which it has been impugned, will nevertheless adjudicate
with the utmost confidence upon every polemical question, denounce,
hate, pity, or pray for the conversion of all who dissent from what they
have been taught, assume, as a matter beyond the faintest possibility
of doubt, that the opinions they have received without inquiry must be
true, and that the opinions which others have arrived at by inquiry must
be false, and make it a main object of their lives to assail what they
call heresy in every way in their power, except by examining the grounds
on which it rests. It is possible that the great majority of voices that
swell the clamor against every book which is regarded as heretical, are
the voices of those who would deem it criminal even to open that book,
or to enter into any real, searching, and impartial investigation of the
subject to which it relates. Innumerable pulpits support this tone of
thought, and represent, with a fervid rhetoric _well fitted to excite
the nerves and imaginations of women_, the deplorable condition of
all who deviate from a certain type of opinions or emotions; a blind
propagandism or a secret wretchedness penetrates into countless
households, poisoning the peace of families, chilling the mental
confidence of husband and wife, _adding immeasurably to the difficulties
which every searcher into truth has to encounter, and diffusing far and
wide intellectual timidity, disingenuousness, and hypocrisy_."--Lecky.
2. "The clergy, with a few honorable exceptions, have in all modern
countries been the avowed enemies of the diffusion of knowledge, the
danger of which to their own profession they, by a certain instinct,
seem always to have perceived."--Buckle.
3. "In the fourth century there arose monachism, and in, the sixth
century the Christians succeeded in cutting off the last ray of
knowledge, and shutting up the schools of Greece. Then followed a long
period of theology, ignorance, and vice."--Puckle.
4. "Contempt for human sciences was one of the first features of
Christianity. It had to avenge itself of the outrages of philosophy; it
feared that spirit of investigation and doubt, that confidence of man in
his own reason, the pest alike of all religious creeds. The light of
the natural sciences was ever odious to it, and was ever regarded with a
suspicious eye, as being a _dangerous enemy to the success of miracles_;
and there is no religion that does not oblige its sectaries to follow
some physical absurdities. _The triumph of Christianity was thus
the final signal of the entire decline both of the sciences and of
philosophy_."--"Progress of the Human Mind," _Condorcet_.
"Accordingly it ought not to astonish us that Christianity, _though
unable in the sequel to prevent their reappearance in splendor after
the invention of printing_, was at this period sufficiently powerful to
accomplish their ruin."--Ibid.
"In the disastrous epoch at which we are now arrived, we shall see the
human mind _rapidly descending from the height to which it had
raised itself_... Everywhere was corruption, cruelty, and perfidy....
Theological reveries, superstitions, delusions, are become the sole
genius of man, religious _intolerance his only morality_; and Europe,
crushed between sacerdotal tyranny and military despotism, awaits in
blood and in tears the moment when the _revival of light shall restore
it to liberty, to humanity, and to virtue_.... The priests held human
learning in contempt.... Fanatic armies laid waste the provinces.
Executioners, _under the guidance of legates and priests_, put to
death those whom the soldiers had spared. _A tribunal of monks was
established, with power of condemning to the stake whoever should be
suspected of making use of his reason_.... All sects, all governments,
every species of authority, inimical as they were to each other in
every point else, seemed to be of accord in granting no quarter to the
exercise of reason.... Meanwhile education, being everywhere subjected
[to the clergy], had corrupted everywhere the general understanding,
by _clogging the reason of children with the weight of the religious
prejudices of their country_... In the eighth century an ignorant pope
had persecuted a deacon for contending that the earth was round,
in opposition to the opinion of the rhetorical Saint Austin. In the
fifteenth, the ignorance of another pope, much more inexcusable,
delivered Galileo into the hands of the inquisition, _accused of having
proved the diurnal and annual motion of the earth_. The greatest genius
that modern Italy has given to the sciences, overwhelmed with age and
infirmities, was obliged to purchase his release from punishment and
from prison, by asking pardon of God for having taught men better to
understand his works."--Ibid.
Appendix H.
1. Fenelon, a celebrated French clergyman and writer of the seventeenth
century, discouraged the acquisition of knowledge by women.--See
Hallam's "Lit. of Europe."
2. "Perhaps it is to the spirit of Puritanism that we owe the
little influence of women, and the consequent inferiority of their
education."--Buckle.
3. "In England (1840) a distrust and contempt for reason prevails
amongst religious circles to a wide extent; many Christians think it
almost a matter of duty to decry the human faculties as poor, mean,
and almost worthless; and thus seek to exalt piety at the expense of
intelligence."--Morell's "Hist. of Speculative Phil."
4. "That women are more deductive than men, because they think quicker
than men, is a proposition which some people will not relish, and yet
it may be proved in a variety of ways. Indeed nothing could prevent its
being universally admitted except the fact that the remarkable rapidity
with which women think is obscured by that miserable, that contemptible,
that preposterous system, called their education, in which valuable
things are carefully kept from them, and trifling things carefully
taught to them, until their fine and nimble minds are too often
irretrievably injured."--Buckle.
Appendix I.
1. "The Roman [Pagan] religion was essentially domestic, and it was
a main object of the legislator to surround marriage with every
circumstance of dignity and solemnity. _Monogamy was, from the earliest
times, strictly enjoined_, and it was one of the great benefits that
have resulted from the expansion of Roman power, _that it made this type
dominant in Europe_. In the legends of early Rome we have ample evidence
both of the high moral estimate of women, and of their prominence in
Roman life. The tragedies of Lucretia and of Virginia display a delicacy
of honor, a sense of the supreme excellence of unsullied purity, which
no Christian nation could surpass."--Lecky, "European Morals," Vol. 1,
p. 316.
2. "Marriage [under Christian rule] was viewed in its coarsest and most
degraded form. The notion of its impurity took many forms, and
exercised _for some centuries_ an extremely wide influence over the
Church."--Ibid., p. 343.
Appendix J.
1. "We are continually told that civilization and Christianity have
restored to the woman her just rights. Meanwhile the wife is the actual
bond-servant of her husband; no less so, as far as legal obligation
goes, than slaves commonly so called. She vows a lifelong obedience
to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life by law.
Casuists may say that the obligation of obedience stops short of
participation in crime, but it certainly extends to everything else. She
can do no act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. She can
acquire no property but _for him_; the instant it becomes hers, even if
by inheritance, it becomes _ipso facto_ his. In this respect the wife's
position under the common law of England is worse than that of slaves
in the laws of many countries; by the _Roman_ law, for example, a slave
might have _peculium_, which, to a certain extent, the law guaranteed
him for his exclusive use."--Mill.
2. Speaking of self-worship which leads to brutality toward others, Mill
says: "Christianity will never practically teach it" (the equality of
human beings) "while it sanctions institutions grounded on an arbitrary
preference for one human being over another."
"The morality of the first ages rested on the obligation to submit to
power; that of the ages next following, on the right of the weak to the
forbearance and protection of the strong. How much longer is one form of
society and life to content itself with the morality made for another?
We have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry
and generosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice."
--Ibid.
"Institutions, books, education, society all go on training human beings
for the old, long after the new has come; much more when it is only
coming."--Ibid.
"There have been abundance of people, in all ages of Christianity, who
tried... to convert us into a sort of Christian Mussulmans, with the
Bible for a Koran, prohibiting all improvement; and great has been their
power, and many have had to sacrifice their lives in resisting them. But
they have been resisted, _and the resistance has made us what we are,
and will yet make us what we are to be_."--Ibid.