A traditional characteristic of the Roman is that he has always given a fairer share of life to women than other Italians. Since the day when Romulus called the Roman _curiae_ after the thirty Sabine women who had thrown themselves into the breach for the Romans, and conferred on them special privileges, the Roman woman has played a dignified part in the life of the city. As priestesses the vestals possessed privileges shared by none but the emperor; and the idea of the Roman matron, the wife not "in the hand" of her husband, was a Roman contribution to social ethics two thousand years before the idea occurred to Englishmen. There is nothing that antiquity has handed down to us more dignified than the seated female figures in Roman museums. These views of women ceased, naturally enough, when Rome which had been the greatest political became the greatest clerical city in the world; but the Roman tradition was handed on in the Italian universities outside Rome, which admitted women five hundred years before they were allowed to share in the benefits of those colleges of Cambridge and Oxford which their money and influence had done so much to endow. The women of the people still, however, enjoy in Rome "an almost unlimited liberty." The Roman man shares his recreations with his wife, and the wife-kicking which is such a plague spot in the life of the common people in England, is not one of them. English fair-play to women is indeed merely a matter of class; it has never penetrated to the lower strata, and in the English middle as in the English lower class the men are still "the lords of creation." This conjugal relation in fact remains a bulwark of a certain coarseness which no one can deny to the Englishman, and which is registered in the Italian's firm opinion that English wives are bought and sold in open market. In other parts of Italy, however, in Calabria and the Abruzzi (even Piedmont is conspicuous for want of gallantry), the wife is regarded simply as a chattel, and the brutal husband aims his blow at his wife's face in order that the neighbours may recognise _il segno del marito_. The sufficient explanation _e suo_ (it is his own) is the same which will be given you if a youth maltreats a dog; and in both cases the moral quality of the argument is as ignoble as it can be.