July 8, 1871
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“The sale of WOODHULL & CLAFLIN’S WEEKLY is prohibited throughout the length and breadth of the German Empire.” And this government is to last. Kaiser William stands appalled at the three thousand miles away echoes of truth and free thought!
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THE “GOLDEN AGE.”
In another column will be found a letter from a valued correspondent upon the Golden Age and its editor, to which we invite attention. Theodore Tilton is a rare type of man—almost unique—combining the modern American go-ahead-ativeness (he will scarcely pardon this barbarous word) with deep moral convictions, and a nature saturated with aesthetic instincts. It is not enough with him that we should make progress, and rapid progress, in truth, but we must have present apprehension of grace and beauty; traveling in elegantly appointed vehicles; we must stop on the road at all points of loveliness, and we must have the delectable hill in the distance. The old Independent, with its admixture of dry goods and orthodoxy, was no field for Theodore Tilton. He was equally out of place in the rule and rubric service of the temple or at the bench of the money changer, and we, in common with all liberal thinkers, rejoiced in the issue of the Golden Age. His paper is the reflex of himself. The mere make up is attractive; and just as in architecture a structure ought to prefigure the purposes for which it is intended, so by the law of eternal fitness a newspaper ought in its type and arrangement to correspond with the general purport of its columns. The lettering even of the title and headlines can be made to harmonize with the art, culture or refined taste of its reading matter. We are not of those who think that this iron age is an age of deterioration; rather, that as the world grows older, it grows wiser and better; and we are disposed to think that society and its institutions are just as much better than they were eighteen hundred years ago as that epoch, with its organization and civil policy, was better than the day when Nimrod, the mighty hunter, ruled the earth by rapine and cruelty. We are glad to turn to the Golden Age as the exponent of those theoretic principles of virtue, love, beauty and harmony of which its name is the accepted verbal symbol.
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THE FOLLOWING passage in Victoria C. Woodhull’s letter to the New York Times and World was so carefully and plainly worded that we thought there could be no mistake about its import:
“I advocate free-love in the highest, purest sense as the only cure for the immorality, the deep damnation by which men corrupt and disfigure God’s most holy institution of sexual relations.”
The Anglo-American, an English paper commenting on it, finds it so unanswerable that before it can find basis for an argument it has to change one of the terms thus:
“It is not marriage, but sexual intercourse, then, that is God’s most holy institution.”
Such disingenuousness strengthens our case. If a moral position can only be turned by false statement and willful perversion, the victory is won.
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THOSE DOLLAR CONTRIBUTIONS.
The National Woman’s Suffrage Association require funds to continue the good work so well conducted since last winter by Mrs. Hooker and Mrs. Grifting. As an inducement to friends to forward their names to Mrs. Griffing with the dollar inclosure, we announce that for every such dollar thus contributed to the cause we will send WOODHULL & CLAFLIN’S WEEKLY six months. Let every friend of humanity do this much to forward the work, the weight of which has thus far fallen upon the shoulders of a very few persons.
All letters containing contributions should be addressed Mrs. Josephine S. Griffing, Secretary National Woman’s
Suffrage Association, Washington, D. C., who will forward the names of contributors to us.
This will also explain to such persons as have already made the aforesaid contribution why they are receiving the WEEKLY.
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