WOMA N.

PART EIGHTH.

PROMISE OF THE FUTURE.

FROM the past history and present condition of woman, we turn with hope and joy to the spectacle of her future destiny. It cannot be that God has created this lovely portion of our race for a never-ending condition of degradation and slavery. We cannot fathom the designs of Omnipotence-but it is the highest honor we can pay to a Being of infinite wisdom and justice, to believe that our race is moving forward toward a condition of higher development and greater happiness.

It must be that the world is yet in its infancy-that the race has a far nobler destiny than it has yet enjoyed and in that higher civilization of which we see the dawning promise, there must be for woman some glorious compensations for the sufferings and miseries of the past. Beautiful woman was made to be the queen of the earth, the joy and pride of the human race, the purest and loveliest of the creatures of God; and we are not infidels enough to doubt that all manifest destinies will one day or other be accomplished.

We might be faithless, and feel desperate in regard to man; but we cannot give up woman to the miseries of savageism, barbarism, and even of civilization, through all coming centuries. We might suppose that it was the destiny of men to oppress, enslave, and butcher each other, in all coming time, as it has been in all time past; but we must believe in a better fate for that portion of our race, which, even now, is gifted with angelic attributes, and whose influence and society give us our only idea of paradise.

Yes the day is coming when woman, developed, refined, elevated to the position which God has designed for her, will preside over a beautified planet, and worthily receive the homage and adoration of the sex that now treats her with ingratitude, and, too often, with ignominy. We record the prophecy, with a deep faith that its fulfilment is approaching; yet it must be generations-it may be centuries-before this promise will be realized by even the most favored portions of our race. Nations must be revo

lutionized, sects decay, institutions crumble, perhaps whole races perish; but, as surely as the earth is as surely as God exists-the fulness of time will come, when all that the Creator has designed for man on the earth, will be accomplished. Atheists may scoff, infidels may jeer, but the grand passions which God has implanted in the breast of man, point ever to his destiny-the destiny of the human race, the planet created for its home, and all subordinate existencies upon it. The most brilliant being of that glorious future will be woman-and some of the steps by which she is to advance to the happiness in store for her, we shall endeavor to point out in our concluding pages.

With a few bright passages of soft sunshine, the picture of the past of woman has been a gloomy one. It is darkened all over with horrors. Poor, sick, ignorant, enslaved, crushed with bigotries, maddened with fanaticisms-enduring a thousand forms of untold misery-the fate of woman has been dark and damning. In her best condition-under the highest civilization-she suffers multiplied miseries; and for too many of the gentle sex, this bright world— gemmed all over with Divine beneficence-has been only a "vale of tears." Shall we not strengthen our faith in God, with the belief that a better day is dawning?

We look for no miraculous revelations of Omnipotenceno ushering in of a millennium, with the pomp of angelic ministration and sublime elemental phenomena. The sun will shine on in the heavens; the order and harmony of the universe will not be disturbed. No-the means by which our race is to advance to a high condition of happiness, are of a natural and simple character. We have only to look back upon the past, to judge of the future. • We have advanced from savageism to civilization-and

the same means must continue to carry us still onward and upward. Light seems to be just dawning over the earth-but even in that dawning light, what vast advances have been made! If the meagre and ill-diffused intelligence now existing, has accomplished so much, what may we not expect from general enlightenment? He has not rightly studied the past, who permits himself to despair of the future.

Great changes will doubtless take place in the world, within the progress of a few centuries. On this continent, we see the red race gradually fading from existence. A similar change in population seems to be going on in Australia and Polynesia. We may reasonably look forward to the time, when Asia and Africa will be repeopled, by races of a higher order than those by which they are now inhabited. The amalgamated European races, there is reason to believe, will in a few centuries occupy every portion of the habitable globe. The repeopling of the American continent by these races is going on with such regularity and rapidity, that its progress can be calculated with some degree of certainty.

With these changes in population and races, there cannot fail to be corresponding revolutions in governments and institutions. Progress is death to despotisms. The American continent will doubtless be a vast congeries of republics, united together under one or more federal governments. All tyrannies will be overthrown, before the spread of intelligence, until the earth shall be filled with knowledge and liberty.

Man has been left to work out his own destiny, and to the regular and infallible operation of the laws which regulate the moral world; as others govern the physical. We can no more doubt the inevitable results of the operation of one, than of the other. The same God that made the universe, has also made man; in the physical creation order came by degrees from chaos; we cannot doubt that the same brilliant result will be displayed in due season, in the progress of human society. Without such a faith, we must believe that all has been left to blind chance, or that the creation of the human race has been a lamentable failure. There can be no true faith in God, or reverence

for his character, without a belief in a noble destiny for

man.

And to this noble destiny, how many circumstances are now contributing. Every day brings forward some grand discovery for his amelioration, and man is, step by step, gaining mastery over the powers of nature. He subdues the winds and the waves to do his bidding. He sets at work the expansive force of heat and drives machinery that can multiply its powers without imit. The waters prepare our food and clothing, fire transports us in the steamer and rail car, and we communicate our thoughts by lightning, while the press gives the same thought to millions, and spreads it around the globe. By such means mankind are in the process of securing an immense production of wealth with little labor; and by the aid of schools and the press, the thoughts of the foremost of mankind in genius and goodness, will soon become the thoughts of all. The world is a great school, and the whole race has begun to receive an education. The people are learning their rights, and from knowing them to obtaining them, the step is short and

easy. Just so fast as the world becomes enlightened, just so fast will it be free, and with freedom and knowledge, our progress will be rapid, and its results glorious.

Woman has an important part in this progress of the world. She is to be redeemed, and then, to be the redeemer of the race. The world is to be governed and guided by love and wisdom; and if man is the representation of wisdom, woman is the spirit of love; and though man's may be the guiding reason, her's will be the propelling power. Could we make all the women of the world at once, what women should be, in health, in intelligence, and in moral sentiment, the great work of human redemption would be at once accomplished. The changes that must take place in the character and condition of woman, are therefore worthy of a serious consideration, and to these changes we now propose to direct our attention.

The first condition of the full and glorious development of woman is health-the condition of health, as of all other good, is intelligence; and intelligence the world is beginning to acquire. Ignorance has plunged generations of women into hardships, excesses, vices, and neglects, which

have injured their constitutions, and poisoned and stunted the race. Nature meant every woman to be full of health, vigor, and beauty; ignorance has caused a vast majority to be born and live, weak, crippled and deformed; and as a sick mother cannot bear a healthy child, and as the causes of sickness are continued by ignorance, the course of human misery flows onward. Science, and especially the most important science, that of the human constitution, has been confined to a few-to the members of a privileged profession, who have made the ignorance of others the means of their own wealth and honors. While all knowledge of the human constitution was confined to doctors, whose business has been to cure people who were sick, and not to prevent them from becoming so, no reform in public health, and consequently in physical development could have been expected. The seeds of disease and death bring forth the physician's harvest. We need not wonder that he does not endeavor to remove the seeds, or prevent their germination.

No-the doctor has shrouded his pretended sciencewhich is but too often real ignorance--in a thick veil of mystery, which he has sedulously guarded. The spread of a knowledge of the laws of health, he has well known, must be a death-blow to his profession; and next to that, he has dreaded an exposure of its quackeries and abuses: but, men are becoming too wise to submit much longer to a mental despotism which has for ages filled the world with disease and death. The present sanitary condition and awful mortality of the human race, will in a few ages be looked back upon with horror, and people will wonder at our blindness, self-satisfied ignorance, and the strange infatuation with which we trust those whose very bread depends upon the prevalence of sickness and our ignorance of its causes and cure!

The laws of nature-the designs of a beneficent Creator-could never have contemplated, as an ultimate result, such a scene of misery, distress, and mortality, as this world exhibits. Nature tends to harmony and perfectionbut God has left us to discover the laws of both the material and the moral world. All human science, all art, all invention, has been the result of progressive study and trial,