no puede liberarse cuando el resorte civil se ha gastado. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Stellen wir uns als unbestreitbaren Grundsatz auf, dass die ersten natürlichen Triebe stets gut sind; es gibt im menschlichen Herzen keine angeborene Verderbtheit; es befindet sich in ihm kein einziges Laster, von dem man nicht sagen kann, wie und wodurch es in es eingedrungen ist.

Vague assertions as to the equality of the sexes and the similarity of their duties are only empty words; they are no answer to my argument. It is a poor sort of logic to quote isolated exceptions against laws so firmly established. Women, you say, are not always bearing children.

Granted; yet that is their proper business. Because there are a hundred or so of large towns in the world where women live licentiously and have few children, will you maintain that it is their business to have few children? And what would become of your towns if the remote country districts, with their simpler and purer women, did not make up for the barrenness of your fine ladies? There are plenty of country places where women with only four or five children are reckoned unfruitful. In conclusion, although here and there a woman may have few children, what difference does it make? Is it any the less a woman's business to be a mother? And do not the general laws of nature and morality make provision for this state of things?

Even if there were these long intervals, which you assume, between the periods of pregnancy, can a woman suddenly change her way of life without danger? Can she be a nursing mother to-day and a soldier tomorrow? Will she change her tastes and her feelings as a chameleon changes his color? Will she pass at once from the privacy of household duties and indoor occupations to the buffeting of the winds, the toils, the labors, the perils of war? Will she be now timid, now brave, now fragile, now robust? If the young men of Paris find a soldier's life too hard for them, how would a woman put up with it, a woman who has hardly ventured out of doors without a parasol and who has scarcely put a foot to the ground? Will she make a good soldier at an age when even men are retiring from
this arduous business?

There are countries, I grant you, where women bear and rear children with little or no difficulty, but in those lands the men go half-naked in all weathers, they strike d

Cuando hay que hacer lo contrario de mi voluntad, no lo hago, ocurra lo que ocurra; tampoco hago mi voluntad, porque soy débil. Me abstengo de actuar: dado que toda mi debilidad es para la acción, toda mi fuerza es negativa, y todos mis pecados son de omisión, raramente de comisión.