ABOUT WOMEN.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), 16 February 1883, Page 3

ABOUT WOMEN.

Rev. R. M'Kenzie,. of San Francisco, recently lectured on this topic in Sacramento.' A notice of his lecture closes as follows :- -'• For 4000 years man misunderstood steam: for nearly 1800 years be misapplied it. So Avith the Avomau : for ages'she Avas either a slave to draw his plough in the field, or an ornament to whirl his chariot in the street. He Aveut backdown the ages and sketched the position of Avomen on the ancient shores of Greece. History teems Avith stories of shield, and SAvord,"and heroes : but where Avas Avomau r Hector's Avife Avas in his stable currying bis horses. Man was to the fore then in all his glory, but Avomau Avas behind a veil. The Avholc conception of Greek art was masculine. If the Greeks forgot Avomau, the Romans abused her. There was no divorce for them, they said : no indeed, for the husband held that in his oavh hand, and might beat, kill, and bury the wife, and go free. Cato apologised for shoAviug affection to his wife once in public ._ Cicero shed tears over his daughter's bier, and was compelled to apologise for his unnianliness. Of Cicero's five hundred letters, not one mentions his mother. The heroic age was all masculine. There is not a nation that had a Latin cradle that knows to-day how to treat a Avomau. The French do not understand her, and the Salic law is in force in that land. On the shores of the Mediterranean she is yet a slave in lust, and her worn charms find the open sack and Avaitiug sea. He depicted the tortures _of women in Arabia ; their degraded condition among the Tartar races ; their degradation in Persia ; their ignoble position in India, and their cruel slavery in many tribes of men. Yet all these avouicu have the qualities that Avould fit them for the joys of civilisation and make them capable of all the hopes of love. Exceptions, like sunny spots iv wintry defiles in Scotland, he found all through history, plenty of them : exceptions in literature, Avar, poetry, art, and politics--great examples, but only exceptions. He came finally to the women of this day, in the advanced countries, aud contrasted their position Avith that of those he had sketched, and declared that, like the Scotch Avomeu at the battle of Baunockburn, they must come to the battle's thickest now. for their homes, and as Thomas Jefferson said, be in the forefront of the fight or deserve to loose all. He closed Avith a brilliant appeal for Avoman's equal right politically, and said that while alibis prejudices were against Avomau suffrage, in the march of right and truth such Presbyterian prejudices as his would be SAvept away like chaff." It is not at all likely that Avhen the rev. lecturer arrives at the celestial gate he Avill have to make a very elaborate apology and explanation to St. Peter for having entertained those "prejudices" to any very serious extent —or for any extravagant wrongful acts to which they impelled him in his probation here. The world

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