And that is how the law still stands to-day--a woman’s contribution--the most that could be done at the time for justice to women. But there is no statue to Caroline Norton in Parliament Square--or anywhere else, so far as I know. But what I specially want to draw attention to is this--that when she wrote the pamphlet with which she started her agitation all her relatives entreated her not to publish it, because it would be an exposure to the world of her own private affairs. By that time, however, Caroline Norton had learned her lesson in “womanliness,” and she no longer said “Happy is the woman who has no history.” Her answer was: “There is too much fear of publicity among women: with women it is reckoned a crime to be accused, and such a disgrace that they wish nothing better than to hide themselves and say no more about it.” Does not that set forth in all its weakness the conventional womanly attitude of the period? The Bill which, through her efforts, was brought three times before Parliament, was at first defeated. How? By the votes of the Judges, to whom the House of Lords left the matter to be decided. And Lord Brougham, in speaking against that Bill used this line of argument: There were, he said, several legal hardships which were of necessity inflicted on women; therefore we should not relieve them from those which are not necessary--the necessary hardships being the greater; and it being bad policy to raise in women a false expectation that the legal hardships relating to their sex were of a removable kind! Was ever a more perverted and devilish interpretation given to the Scripture, “To him that hath shall be given, and from her that hath not shall be taken even that which she hath.” Let us remember that we are the direct descendants and inheritors of the age and of the men who pronounced these unjust judgments, and that no miracle has happened between then and now to remove the guilt of the fathers from the third and the fourth generation. Heredity is too strong a thing for us to have any good ground for believing that our eyes, even now, are entirely opened. There are many of us who cannot drink port at all, because our grandfathers drank it by the bottle every night of their lives. We inherit constitutions, personal and political--we also inherit proverbs, which express so vividly and in so few words, the full-bodied and highly-crusted wisdom of former generations. Those proverbs expressed once--else they had not become proverbs--an almost universal contemporary opinion. Some of them are now beginning to wear thin, have of recent years been dying the death, and will presently be heard no more. But their source and incentive are still quite recognisable; and their dwindled spirit still lives in our midst. There was one, for instance, on which genteel families were brought up in the days of my youth--a rhymed proverb which laid it down that-- A whistling woman and a crowing hen Are hateful alike to God and men.