1 _Feminism_ And first, with due propriety, let us listen to the case of woman _vs._ the _status quo_. We imagine the argument as put by a studious and apparently harmless young lady. She begins gently and proceeds _crescendo_. “The case for woman is quite simple; as simple as the case for democracy. We are human beings, we are governed, we are taxed; and we believe that just government implies the consent of the governed. “We might have been content with the old life, had you masters of the world been content to leave us the old life. But you would not. Your system of industry has made the position of most young men so hopeless and insecure that they are year by year putting back the age of marriage. You have forced us out of our homes into your factories; and you have used us as a means of making still harder the competition for employment among the men. Your advocates speak of the sacredness of the home; and meanwhile you have dragged 5,000,000 English women out of their homes to be the slaves of your deadening machines.[291] You exalt marriage; and in this country one woman out of every ten is unmarried, and one out of every twenty married women works in your unclean shops. The vile cities born of your factory-system have made life so hard for us, temptations so frequent, vice so attractive and convenient, that we cannot grow up among you without suffering some indelible taint. “Some of us go into your factories because we dread marriage, and some of us marry because we dread your factories. But there is not much to choose between them. If we marry we become machines for supplying another generation of workers and soldiers; and if we talk of birth-control you arrest us. As if we had no right to all that science has discovered! And the horror of it is that while you forbid us to learn how to protect ourselves and our children from the evils of large families, you yourselves buy this knowledge from your physicians and use it; and one of your societies for the prevention of birth-control has been shown to consist of members with an average of 1.5 children per family.[292] Your physicians meet in learned assemblies and vote in favor of maintaining the law which forbids the spread of this information; and then we find that physicians have the smallest average family in the community.[293] One must be a liar and a thief to fit comfortably into this civilization which you ask us to defend.