thread that is purest and most fine, Bidjapour wrenches from the bowels of the earth its sparkling pebbles, and the Sevres gilds its snow-white clay.  Night and day she reflects upon new costumes and spends her life in considering dress and in plaiting her apparel.  She moves about exhibiting her brightness and freshness to people she does not know, but whose homage flatters her, while the desire she excites charms her, though she is indifferent to those who feel it.  During the hours which she spends in private, in pleasure, and in the care of her person, she amuses herself by caroling the sweetest strains.  For her France and Italy ordain delightful concerts and Naples imparts to the strings of the violin an harmonious soul.  This species is in fine at once the queen of the world and the slave of passion.  She dreads marriage because it ends by spoiling her figure, but she surrenders herself to it because it promises happiness.  If she bears children it is by pure chance, and when they are grown up she tries to conceal them.

These characteristics taken at random from among a thousand others are not found amongst those beings whose hands are as black as those of apes and their skin tanned like the ancient parchments of an olim; whose complexion is burnt brown by the sun and whose neck is wrinkled like that of a turkey; who are covered with rags; whose voice is hoarse; whose intelligence is nil; who think of nothing but the bread box, and who are incessantly bowed in toil towards the ground; who dig; who harrow; who make hay, glean, gather in the harvest, knead the bread and strip hemp; who, huddled among domestic beasts, infants and men, dwell in holes and dens scarcely covered with thatch; to whom it is of little importance from what source children rain down into their homes.  Their work it is to produce many and to deliver them to misery and toil, and if their love is not like their labor in the fields it is at least as much a work of chance.

Alas! if there are throughout the world multitudes of trades-women who sit all day long between the cradle and the sugar-cask, farmers’ wives and daughters who milk the cows, unfortunate women who are employed like beasts of burden in the manufactories, who all day long carry the loaded basket, the hoe and the fish-crate, if unfortunately there exist these common human beings to whom the life of the soul, the benefits of education, the delicious tempests of the heart are an unattainable heaven; and if Nature has decreed that they should have coracoid processes and hyoid bones and thirty-two vertebrae, let them remain for the physiologist classed with the ourang-outang.  And here we make no stipulations for the leisure class; for those who have the time and the sense to fall in love; for the rich who have purchased the right of indulging their passions; for the intellectual who have conquered a monopoly of fads.  Anathema on all those who do not live by thought.  We say Raca and fool to all those who are not ardent, young,