When Ibsen thus calls attention to the importance and the gravity of the feeling of revolt which has long rankled in the minds of thinking women all over the world, and which manifested itself long before Ibsen’s pieces were known outside Norway, he cannot fairly be said to be responsible for the growing discontent. In reality, he has rendered the world a great service: for the new views and aspirations of modern educated women can neither be suppressed nor ignored without considerable danger to society. In order to understand that the demand for the purification of marriage is not a transitory whim, it will suffice to consider who made the marriage laws, and, what is more important, who inaugurated the traditional views concerning them. Men alone did. Not the young men, who would be largely swayed by the yearning for true love and by chivalrous considerations, but the law-makers of old; that is to say, elderly men of influence and fortune. In the olden times, when the foundations of social customs were laid, the rights of women were considerably less respected than in our days; and under such circumstances the law-makers did not feel called upon to consider woman to any large extent, but made laws and introduced customs which suited themselves. What they wanted was, firstly, to marry young and beautiful wives, despite all objections that might be raised against their age, their looks, or their characters, and without much troublesome courtship; and, secondly, to keep their young wives in subjection by sheer force and legal compulsion. It is not reasonable to suppose that the fair sex should submit for ever to such treatment, and, as the women in the English-speaking countries have already gained large concessions, it is natural that their sisters in the rest of the civilized world should struggle for reform.