plying any deficiency of moral sentiment on the part of those men and women who enter into them.* 16. As the above reasons upon which the liberty of married women is founded, do not apply to the case of the unmarried; it is to be observed that unmarried women, in those same societies, are still subject to all the old restrictions; and, indeed, are more strictly guarded than elsewhere, lest they might be seduced by the example of the liberty allowed to the married. 17. As a counterpart to, and illustration of, the preceding observations, we may refer to the operation, in a very different state of society, of an approach towards equality on the part of the women. In the more northerly States of the American Union, within the last thirty years, great pains have been * These notions of the rights of married women, originated with, and were at first limited to, the upper class. But the political revolutions in France having levelled all ranks, all ranks have claimed, upon this point, as upon others, equal privileges, whence has resulted a curious confusion of ideas upon several points of morals, and especially upon this point of the rights of married women, - a confusion of ideas very obvious in all the modern French dramatists and novelists. Though they often speak as though they considered the breach of marital fidelity on the part of a woman to be wrong, the general current of their ideas sets quite the other way; nor can any thing different be expected, so long as marriages in France are made, not by the parties themselves, but by their relations. We may observe, however, that the same inconsistences of opinion on the duties of the marriage relation so obvious in recent French literature, pervades, also, the literature of the last half of the eighteenth century. Those free notions above sketched never obtained exclusive currency, even in the saloons of Paris. Even there they still encountered the lingering fragments of older opinions; and in this case, as in others, expressions remained the same, long after opinions and practice had altered. taken with female education; and in point of intelligence and general information, the women, on the average, have been raised nearly, or quite, to a level with the men. Many of the promoters of this scheme of female education are puzzled and alarmed to find, that this elevation of women has produced its natural effect; and that, no longer satisfied with that total absorption in their obtained or expected husbands which constitutes the Anglo-Saxon idea of female duty, they are beginning to put forward several embarrassing claims to a greater social equality. Among other matters the attention of some of them has been strongly attracted to the unequal yoke, as respects the matter of chastity, imposed upon men and women by current forensic morals; and they have formed certain societies, called "Societies for Moral Reform," for the purpose of vindicating the Rights of Women upon this point. The founders of these societies have all been educated in the mystic-ascetic code to be expounded in the next chapter, and besides, are themselves much under the influence of the very opinions of which they complain. Hence they would start back with horror and indignation, from the idea of claiming or accepting the liberty which men enjoy. rejecting that alternative, they insist upon the other. They demand that men should be subjected to the same restraints with themselves; that all male departures from chastity should be visited by obloquy ; and that, in defect of such obloquy inflicted by public opinion, punishment for seduction should find a place in the laws. But, That forensic moralists and especially that legislators should raise some objections to these demands is not surprising; but the violent opposition, the reproaches and ridicule which these societies have encountered at the hands even of reverend professors of ascetic-mystic morals, is one among innumerable instances of the coolness with which men reject the most legitimate deductions from their own premises, whenever those conclusions run counter to their habits or their inclinations. CHAPTER VI. ASCETIC SYSTEMS OF MORALS. 1. A HOST of moralists forensic and mystic, from Lycurgus, Pythagoras, and Cato the Censor, through St. Austin, Calvin, Wesley, and Whitefield, down to the journalists and preachers of the present day, with an intervening line of the most heterogeneous description, including almost all the disciples of the self-sacrificing school, have united in the condemnation of Luxury, or what they have sometimes called Self-indulgence, as utterly hostile to all good morals. By luxury, has been intended the pursuit of pleasures not commonly indulged in; and the condemners of luxury may be arranged into the three classes of Political, Philosophical, and Mystical Ascetics. 2. In the times of the ancient Greek republics, when war was the chief occupation of the free citi zens, and when each community was at all times liable to be attacked on all sides, and, if defeated, to be plundered and ruined and to have all its citizens sold into slavery; in those times, when courage and hardihood were considered the most beneficial, and, therefore, the most estimable of qualities, every thing that tended to soften and refine manners, and to render the citizens less warlike, that is to say, every thing that tended to advance civilization, was condemned, under the name of luxury, as ruinous to the community, and, therefore, immoral and criminal. In the latter days of the Roman Republic, when the vast conquests of that warlike community had converted the Senators and the Equestrian order into an oligarchy of potentates vying with kings and with each other in wealth and magnificence, and struggling with each other for the possession of power, while the great mass of the citizens had become mere mercenary soldiers; that prodigality of expense, that splendid profusion, which was the natural result of this state of things, was exclaimed against by poets, orators, and historians, as having been its cause. 3. This condemnation of luxury thus commenced by warlike barbarians, or by those who celebrated the praises, and lamented the passing away, of an age of warlike barbarism, was taken up, and pushed still further by two very different schools of moralists. - The first of these schools was that of the cynical Stoics, of whom Diogenes and Epictetus may be taken as specimens. They perceived that the pur suit of pleasures for ourselves often leads us to disregard the pleasures of others; and they hoped to remedy that evil by forbidding the pursuit of pleasures; a plausible but superficial and false idea, which has at all times served to give to ascetic moral codes a certain degree of popularity. This idea leads at once to rigor and severity towards others as well as towards ourselves; for, if pleasures be wrong in us, they are not less wrong in others. Hence that contempt for the vulgar delights and ordinary pleasures of men, and presently that contempt for mankind, which the Stoic philosophy inculcated. Carried out, it relapsed into a system of mere selfishness. The Stoic philosopher, teres et rotundus, wholly wrapped up in himself, cut himself off from all sympathy with mankind, and even lost all disposition to exert himself in their behalf. Indeed, a certain incapacity of sympathizing with the pleasures and desires of others, an insensibility to what are stigmatized as sensual pleasures either constitutional, or oftener brought on by the satiety of excessive indulgence, as in the case of the Jewish moralist, Solomon, and the Christian moralist, St. Austin, or else an incapacity of indulging in such pleasures through sickness, poverty, or social position, giving rise to a feeling of envy against those who are more fortunate; one or the other of these circumstances, or all of them, joined to a strong desire of superiority which discovers no other so easy means of gratification as in declamations against the luxury and depravity of the times, will be found, on a close scrutiny, to lie at the bottom of a great deal of ascetic morality. |