The notion that partnership in toil could justify the assumption of the whole proceeds of the common labours to the use and will of one of the partners did not dawn on the simpler minds of our ancestors. It took centuries of mistranslations of the first principles of government to let this partial idea develop into its modern complexity. In Prynne’s “Fundamental Rights of English Freemen,” p. 3, art. 7, we read, “That it is the ancient and undoubted right of every freeman that he hath a full and absolute propriety in his goods and estate. And that no taxes, taillages, loans, benevolences, or other charge ought to be commanded, imposed, or levied by the King or his ministers, without _common_ consent by Act of Parliament.” In order that husbands might have this absolute proprietary right over the whole of the common property, it was gradually extinguished among wives; and the second right for them naturally lapsed in consequence of the other. The absorption of a married woman’s property by her husband developed for her a massive code of legal restrictions, and a stern doctrine of civil disabilities. She was dissociated first from property, thence from privilege, finally she became property. This was but the natural outcome of the non-recognition of her Personal and Proprietary Rights. In any history, therefore, of British Freewomen, we must practically follow legal precedent, in assuming the non-existence of the _feme couverte_. Through the different principles of inheritance, there have always been fewer heiresses than heirs; through the success of the various methods of protecting male professional and trade industries against female competition, there have always been fewer female owners of earned property; through the lower rate of women’s wages, and various causes tending to disable single women even in the retention of property, these owners represented smaller incomes than did men of their own class.