Good ecenomics in regard to food is surely this: to produce the best quality, in sufficient quantity, with the least expenditure of labor, and to distribute it the most rapidly and freshly to the people who need it.
You expect the men to oppose the freeing of women, they naturally would. But the women, Van— the women themselves—it's un-natural.
"Pretty plain to see," I went on. "We men, having all human power in our hands, have used it to warp and check the growth of women. We, by choice and selection, by law and religion, by enforced ignorance, by heavy overcultivation of sex, have made the kind of woman we so made by nature, that that is what it was to be a woman. Then we heaped our scornful abuse upon her, ages and ages of it, the majority of men in all nations still looking down on women. And then, as if that was not enough—really, my dear, I'm not joking, I'm ashamed, as if I'd done it myself—we, in our superior freedom, in our monopoly of education, with the law in our hands, both to make and execute, with every conceivable advantage—we have blamed women for the sins of the world!"
Seeing women who were People and that they were People because they were women, not in spite of it. Seeing that what we had called "womanliness" was a mere excess of sex, not the essential part of it at all.
I began to see that the greatness of a country is not to be measured by linear space, in extent of land, nor arithmetically by numbers of people, nor shallowly by the achievements of the present and a few left-overs, but by the scope of its predetermined social advance.
I noticed that Ellador and her sisters always said "she" and "her" as unconsciously as we say "he" and "his." Their reason, of course, is that all the people are shes. Our reason is not so justifiable.
kill a common man was murder—to kill a king was regicide. You have got to see that for one man to rob another man is bad enough; for a man to rob the public is worse; but to rob the public through the government is a kind of high treason which—if you still punished by torture— would be deserving of the most excruciating kind. As it is you have allowed the practice to become so common that it is scarcely condemned at all—you do not even call it robbery; you call it 'graft' —or 'pork'—or a 'plum tree'—or some such polite term."
"It is easy to see that as man progresses in social relation he needs more and more a free strong agile mind, with sympathetic perception and understanding and the full power of self-chosen action. The Enforced Belief in any religion claiming to be Final Truth cripples the mind along precisely those lines, tending to promote a foolish sense of superiority to other believers or disbelievers; running to extremes of persecution; preventing sympathy, perception, and understanding, and reducing action to mere obedience.
"As to the land—neglect, waste, awful, glaring waste," she answered promptly. "It makes me sick. It makes me want to cry. As a mere wilderness, of course, it would be interesting, but as a wilderness with a hundred million people in it, and such able people, I don't know whether it is more laughable or horrible. As to the water, neglect and waste again, and hideous, suicidal defilement.
the reason you had so much trouble is not because of the men, but because of this strange dissociation of the men and women. Instead of the smooth, helpful interelationship, you have so much misery. I never knew—of course not, how could I ?—that there could be such misery. To have two kinds of people, evidently adapted for such perfect coordinate action—once in a while you see it, even now—and then to have them hurt and degrade one another so."