It is useless to argue about polygamy, it must be taken as a fact existing everywhere, the mere regulation of which is the problem to be solved.  Where are there, then, any real monogamists?  We all live, at any rate for a time, and the majority of us always, in polygamy.  Consequently, as each man needs many women, nothing is more just than to let him, nay, make it incumbent upon him to provide for many women.  By this means woman will be brought back to her proper and natural place as a subordinate being, and the lady, that monster of European civilisation and Christian-Teutonic stupidity, with her ridiculous claim to respect and veneration, will no longer exist; there will still be women, but no unhappy women, of whom Europe is at present full.  The Mormons’ standpoint is right.

* * * * *

In India no woman is ever independent, but each one stands under the control of her father or her husband, or brother or son, in accordance with the law of Manu.

It is certainly a revolting idea that widows should sacrifice themselves on their husband’s dead body; but it is also revolting that the money which the husband has earned by working diligently for all his life, in the hope that he was working for his children, should be wasted on her paramours. Medium tenuere beati.  The first love of a mother, as that of animals and men, is purely instinctive, and consequently ceases when the child is no longer physically helpless.  After that, the first love should be reinstated by a love based on habit and reason; but this often does not appear, especially where the mother has not loved the father.  The love of a father for his children is of a different nature and more sincere; it is founded on a recognition of his own inner self in the child, and is therefore metaphysical in its origin.

In almost every nation, both of the new and old world, and even among the Hottentots, property is inherited by the male descendants alone; it is only in Europe that one has departed from this.  That the property which men have with difficulty acquired by long-continued struggling and hard work should afterwards come into the hands of women, who, in their want of reason, either squander it within a short time or otherwise waste it, is an injustice as great as it is common, and it should be prevented by limiting the right of women to inherit.  It seems to me that it would be a better arrangement if women, be they widows or daughters, only inherited the money for life secured by mortgage, but not the property itself or the capital, unless there lacked male descendants.  It is men who make the money, and not women; therefore women are neither justified in having unconditional possession of it nor capable of administrating it.  Women should never have the free disposition of wealth, strictly so-called, which they may inherit, such as capital, houses, and estates.  They need a guardian