The condition of women once more attracted the attention of a Liberal Parliament. An Act of 1882 finally separated the wife from her husband in all matters concerned with property, and permitted her to make contracts, and to acquire, hold, and dispose of property as if she were a single woman. Even this reform was incomplete. A husband is still responsible for all the civil wrongs of his wife, except those which consist in breach of contract, and the year 1912 has seen a husband sent to prison because he could not pay income tax on his wife's income which she earned by her own exertions and had not disclosed to him. But the existing relics of the old legal theory which subjected the wife to the husband, and made him responsible for her conduct as if she were a child, are not very numerous or important. Substantially, so far as the law allows, the wife has been economically independent of her husband since 1882. The Contagious Diseases Acts were suspended in 1883, and were finally repealed in 1886. In 1885 the Criminal Law {282} Amendment Act raised the age of consent to sixteen, and penalties were at last imposed upon those who procured women and girls for immoral purposes. Another reform was effected by administrative act. Professor Fawcett, the Postmaster-General, began to employ women in the inferior posts in his department, and so opened to the sex the whole of the large field of labour provided by the Civil Service. These successive improvements in the state of women were made with little difficulty except such as sprang from ignorance, and the indifference of legislators to the special claims of disfranchised classes. As has always been the case, practical reforms were executed by the Legislature when the demand for the enfranchisement of women became urgent. This House of Commons actually contained a majority who had promised to vote for Woman Suffrage. The pledges, given in response to pressure from the women of the middle class, were of that easy, good-natured sort in which Parliamentary candidates indulge in matters to which party is indifferent. The women trusted that they would be carried into effect by an amendment of the Reform Bill of 1884. But the House of Lords offered so much opposition to the Bill as it stood, that Gladstone spoke against the inclusion of women, and the proposal was defeated. The Toryism of class was destroyed. That of sex remained, and it was not until the Liberal revival of twenty years later that it was ever again threatened.