This is what a writer says in the _Westminster Review_: ‘The struggle for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was an ordeal such as men have never been obliged to undergo. It involved not merely that women should speak at public meetings, which was a great innovation, but that they should discuss the most painful of all subjects, upon which, up to that time, even men had not dared to open their mouths. Yet so nobly did the women bear their part all through those terrible years of trial, that they raised a spirit of indignation which swept away the Acts, but never, by word or deed, did they deservedly incur reproach themselves.’ Rubbish, every word of it! The women who spoke upon these painful subjects were under no compulsion, legal or moral, to initiate or take part in the frenzy of wrong-headed emotion, which was exhibited upon public platforms to the dismay and disgust of all right-thinking men and women. It cannot be conceded that the subject was painful to these persons, nor can the statement be allowed to go unchallenged that they did not deserve reproach. Reproach of the most bitter kind was and is deserved by the prejudiced persons who distorted facts and gladly relied upon any hearsay evidence that would seem to square with their theories, and even refused to admit the weight of incontrovertible statistics produced against their rash and windy statements. The examinations of Mrs. Josephine Butler[1] and of those two ridiculous persons, the Unitarian pastor from Southampton and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Kell, are damning indictments of their good faith and good sense. These are types of women and womanish men who take delight in the investigation of pruriency, whose noses are in every cesspool and their hands in the nearest muck-heap. Their kind stop at nothing in the way of unfounded statements, and are greedy of rumour rather than of accredited facts. Want of acquaintance with, or experience of, the subjects they dogmatise upon deterred them as little then as now from case-hardened obstinacy; and perhaps no one cut such a sorry figure before the Commission as that illogical and contradictory person, the late John Stuart Mill, the femininely-influenced author of the nowadays somewhat discredited _Subjection of Women_. ‘His chief ground for objection to the system’ (of the C. D. Acts) ‘was on the score of the infringement of personal liberty’ (_i.e._, the liberty to spread loathsome diseases); ‘but he considered it also objectionable for the Government to provide securities against the consequences of immorality. It is a different thing to remedy the consequences after they occur’--as who should say, in the manner of the proverb, Lock the stable door when the horse has been stolen.