It is a great misfortune, that this estimate of woman not only governs the courts in their decisions, but enters into and moulds all the movements of society. Such an estimate leads to constant contradictions; being, as it is, directly the opposite of the _fact_ in so many cases, and of the Divine Will in all. In a book on woman recently published by a lawyer in England, I found a pithy paragraph to this point, concluding some observations on the comparative longevity of the sexes: "The wife," he says, "_fitly survives the husband_, both to take care of _his_ premature infirmity, and to consummate the rearing of their offspring"!--a creative effort of the imagination which certainly entitles the writer to the laurels of the century. One reason that the wages of women are kept down is, that, for the most part, women do not begin to labor early; do not devote themselves _in youth_ to any trade or profession, so as to compete with men who have. The plodding and steady habits of the man of business, he has acquired in his early years; and they are developed by the fact, that he is sole master of what he can earn, and can dispose of it as he thinks proper: but his wife has been brought up in no such school,--has no such motive to industry. Should she toil on for ever, she cannot possess what she acquires, nor lay out the smallest part of it, without another's leave. Even when man says to her with the sanction of the church and in the presence of God, "With all my worldly goods I thee endow," it means only that she is invited to enjoy, not possess them. This estimate of her rights, her position, and her ability, made manifest in every law-book, in the church itself, and obvious in every social form, discourages her whenever she would devote herself to any lucrative employment; so that it is only in desertion and despair, for the most part, that she becomes a laborer. She is not always conscious of this discouragement. She quiets the Cerberus within by a three-times-repeated "It is not proper," without pausing to analyze the conventional instinct. Here we find the real significance of the proverb, "A man of straw is worth a woman of gold;" for the "man of straw" is, at least, worth such money as he may hereafter earn, which the "woman of gold" is not. We hear a great deal about laws for the _protection_ of women; but we cannot urge too often the remark of James Davis in his Prize Essay of 1854, "that all early legislation for woman was founded, not on her own rights, but on those of her husband and children, and the _State over her_." When one remembers that the "seat of the law is the bosom of God," it strikes one strangely, that moral consequences to character have so little to do with what one may call "sexual legislation."