The Contagious Diseases Acts represented the extreme abuse of the male ego. But the Liberal Government of 1868, which actually passed the second of the two Acts, did not a little in other ways to improve the condition of women. The Married Women's Property Act of 1870 protected the wife's earnings against her husband, and permitted her to enjoy, for her own use, property which she had acquired by inheritance. The Education Act of 1870 permitted women to be elected as members of the new School Boards, and an Act of 1875 admitted them also to Boards of Guardians. These three Acts marked a substantial rise in the social scale. They affected chiefly women of the {259} richer classes. But the admissions which they implied were of indefinite extent. Society had begun to look at the individual within the family as it had begun to look at the individual within the class or sect. The wife was acknowledged to be a separate individual from her husband, and the presence of women on public bodies was a sufficient answer to the argument that women should be confined to those duties which they could only perform in association with men. Marriage had ceased to be the sole object of a decent woman's life. In spite of the monstrous injustice of the Contagious Diseases Acts, woman was being placed in Society, in some measure at least, in accordance with her own worth, and not with the assumptions of male egoism. The foreign policy of the Government was conspicuously Liberal, and it was justified by its results. Liberty was maintained and moral rules were enforced without Palmerston's recklessness, and there were none of the acts of petty bullying with which he had varied his tilting at tyrants. The general outline of the new policy is contained in a memorandum addressed by Mr. Gladstone to the Queen in 1871. He stated its principles to be "That England should keep entire in her own hands the means of estimating her own obligations upon the various states of facts as they arise; that she should not foreclose and narrow her own liberty of choice, by declarations made to other powers, in their real or supported interests, of which they would claim to be joint interpreters; that it is dangerous for her to assume alone an advanced, and therefore an isolated, position, in regard to European controversies; that, come what may, it is better for her to promise too little than too much; that she should not encourage the weak by giving expectations of aid to resist the strong, but should rather seek to deter the strong, by firm but moderate language, from aggression on the weak; that she should seek to develop and mature the action of a common, or public, or European opinion, as the best standing bulwark against wrong, but should beware of seeming to lay down the law of that opinion by her own authority, and thus running the risk of setting against {260} her, and against right and justice, that general sentiment which ought to be, and