Women have come to take their chivalrous protection by law as mere matter-of-course, precisely as they take it as matter-of-course that men should labour, and should endow them with the benefits of their industry. These things are by no means matter-of-course, however, but are matter of chivalry--chivalry so innate as to have become convention. It would be occasion for laughter, were it not cause for profoundest regret, that the hypertrophy of male-traits in woman has engendered to-day a sex-antagonism which has set her in open revolt against man, from whom, if she has suffered and suffers, and will continue to suffer at the hands of his defects, she nevertheless derives, and has always derived from his chivalries her most gracious human privileges. That the obligations and the recompenses of the sexes are reciprocal, is true. It is equally true, however, that the choice has lain with men to have ignored the nobler issues of the compact. As the seraglio-imprisoned women of the less manly and progressive peoples prove. All our civilisation, with its complex sociological, intellectual, and moral developments, rests on a basis of Force. Men must still prove their right to each and all of their laboriously-won achievements by arms and the valours of war. In peace, the laws--which alone make life tolerable--rest equally upon the powers of masculine will and strength to inflict due punishment for violation thereof. And laws having been made by men, it was clearly optional with them to have left women unprotected, or far less protected than the other sex; in place of having extended special protection to their more delicate attributes. In safeguarding women in general, men safeguard their own individual women, of course. Human motive is involved; is the product of a number of factors. That this is so is reason for eliminating no single one of these factors, lest the resultant undergo a wholly unexpected and disastrous transformation. The Plan sets most women at the mercy of most men, by reason of the greater physical strength of males, and by temptation of their more urgent sex-instinct. In view of her inherent disabilities, it would have seemed, _a priori_, that no woman could in ruder days have attained to womanhood, inviolate. And yet that her very disabilities have served for her increasing protection is shown by the fact of her increasing protection as, with the evolution of her higher organisation, her disabilities have intensified. Civilised woman, with her more delicate organisation, is far more defenceless than was savage woman. But in response to the claims of her increasing defencelessness, the instinctive chivalry of the stronger male, her natural protector, has become progressively the intelligent and moral chivalry of higher man. No strength or capability of woman's own to defend herself could so have served her; nor could so have served the other sex for fine incentive.