Ars Recte Vivendi | Page 9

foot equally assume that distortion of the human frame may be
beautiful, and that helpless idleness is the highest sphere of woman.
But the imperfection of our Western civilization shows itself in more
serious forms involving women. The promiscuous herding of men and
women prisoners in jails, the opposition to reformatories and
penitentiaries exclusively for women, and, in general, the failure to
provide, as a matter of course, women attendants and women nurses for
all women prisoners and patients, is a signal illustration of a low tone

of civilization. The most revolting instance of this abuse was the
discovery during the summer that the patients in a woman's insane
hospital in New Orleans were bathed by male attendants.
It should not need such outrages to apprise us of the worth of the
general principle that humanity and decency require that in all public
institutions women should be employed in the care of women. A wise
proposition during the year to provide women at the police-stations for
the examination of women who are arrested failed to become law. It is
hard, upon the merits of the proposal, to understand why. Women who
are arrested may be criminals, or drunkards, or vagabonds, or insane, or
witless, or sick. But whatever the reason of the arrest, there can be no
good reason whatever, in a truly civilized community, that a woman
taken under such circumstances should be abandoned to personal
search and examination by the kind of men to whom that business is
usually allotted. The surest sign of the civilization of any community is
its treatment of women, and the progress of our civilization is shown by
the constant amelioration of that condition. But the unreasonable and
even revolting circumstances of much of the public treatment of them
may wisely modify ecstasies over our vast superiority.
The squeezed waists and other tokens of the kind show that our
civilization has not yet outgrown the conception of the most
meretricious epochs, that woman exists for the delight of man, and is
meant to be a kind of decorated appendage of his life, while the men
attendants and men nurses of women prisoners and patients show a
most uncivilized disregard of the just instincts of sex. We are far from
asserting that therefore the position of women in this country is to be
likened to their position in China, where the contempt of men denied
them souls, or to that among savage tribes, where they are treated as
beasts of burden. But because we are not wallowing in the Slough of
Despond, it does not follow that we are sitting in the House Beautiful.
The traveller who has climbed to the mer de glace at Chamouni, and
sees the valley wide outstretched far below him, sees also far above
him the awful sunlit dome of "Sovran Blanc." Whatever point we may
have reached, there is still a higher point to gain. Nowhere in the world
are women so truly respected as here, nowhere ought they to be more
happy than in this country. But that is no reason that the New Orleans
outrage should be possible, while the same good sense and love of

justice which have removed so many barriers to fair-play for women
should press on more cheerfully than ever to remove those that remain.
(December, 1882)

SECRET SOCIETIES
The melancholy death of young Mr. Leggett, a student at the Cornell
University, has undoubtedly occasioned a great deal of thought in every
college in the country upon secret societies. Professor Wilder, of
Cornell, has written a very careful and serious letter, in which he
strongly opposes them, plainly stating their great disadvantages, and
citing the order of Jesuits as the most powerful and thoroughly
organized of all secret associations, and therefore the one in which their
character and tendency may best be observed. The debate recalls the
history of the Antimasonic excitement in this country, which is,
however, seldom mentioned in recent years, so that the facts may not
be familiar to the reader.
In the year 1826 William Morgan, living in Batavia, in the western part
of New York, near Buffalo, was supposed to intend the publication of a
book which would reveal the secrets of Masonry. The Masons in the
vicinity were angry, and resolved to prevent the publication, and made
several forcible but ineffective attempts for that purpose. On the 11th of
September, 1826, a party of persons from Canandaigua came to Batavia
and procured the arrest of Morgan upon a criminal charge, and he was
carried to Canandaigua for examination. He was acquitted, but was
immediately arrested upon a civil process, upon which an execution
was issued, and he was imprisoned in the jail at Canandaigua. The next
evening he was discharged at the instance of those who had