enable an unhappy parent to recover a recompense for the injury he has sustained by the seduction of his daughter.” I feel sure that the hearts of fathers and mothers among the working classes of England will respond, when I speak of the gross influence and teaching of such a state of the law as this, and of the low estimate of the worth of female honour which alone could have induced it. Here we see that the property of the father, and the material usefulness of his daughter in the house, are set above all the claims of female honour, and above all the considerations of family affection. It is true of nations as well as of individuals, “whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.” We see in all the horrors which our Police Courts at this day reveal to us, of brutality towards women, of heartlessness and treachery in men of the upper classes towards the daughters of the poor, and in the levity and coarseness which accompany the exposure of these villanies, the disgusting and terrible fruits of this one corrupt seed of selfishness and injustice which, for so many generations past, has been marring the beauty of our English laws.[93] The Contagious Diseases Acts would never have been possible in this country, if Englishmen had not become gradually accustomed, through the educational influences of the gross state of the laws of which I have just spoken, to despise the claims of women as such, and to cease, both in theory and in practice, to grant them that equality of citizenship which the Constitution originally bestowed upon them. The outrage upon Lucretia put an end to the regal government in Rome; that upon Virginia proved the destruction of the power of the Decemvirs; an offence against a woman was the occasion of the bloody vespers of Palermo. In England, at this day, the cry, not of one, but of thousands of outraged women is ascending, and entering into the ears of the God of justice and of vengeance! CHAPTER VIII. I come now to treat of the brighter and more hopeful side of the picture, and of the means whereby redress of the wrong lately perpetrated is to be obtained. De Lolme, after dwelling on the privileges of a people who live under a just code of laws, speaks as follows: “But all these privileges of the people, considered in themselves, may be but feeble defences against the real strength of those who govern: all these provisions, all these reciprocal rights, necessarily suppose that things remain in their legal and settled course.” And he goes on to suppose a case in which rulers, suddenly throwing themselves, as it were, out of the Constitution, and no longer respecting the person of the subject, should force upon the nation the enactments of an arbitrary will. He asks, “What then would be the people’s resource?” He answers, “It would be resistance.”