Therefore I trust you will pardon me, O patient and resolute people of England, who have in former national dangers so nobly borne, so long forborne, and so firmly acted, if I adjure you in the present crisis to remember the spirit in which your ancestors fought the battles of freedom, and to hold yourselves thoroughly prepared to _resist this legislation to the uttermost_, while cherishing the spirit of dependence on Divine aid, enjoined on the Hebrews of old in the words, “Stand still, and see the salvation of God.” Remember that the great success attending your former acts of resistance, success which has been dwelt upon in wonder and admiration by our continental neighbours, is mainly owing to the fact that you influence rather than interfere, that you are able and prepared to strike, but refrain from striking. “The power of the people is not when they strike, but when they keep their rulers in awe. It is when they can overthrow everything that they never need to move.” I have said that we live under a system of just laws, and I have praised our representative government. But we owe the existence of the Acts of Parliament which we condemn, in a great measure to a grave fault in these laws, and a grave inadequacy in that representative government. I have already spoken of that fault in our laws. It cannot be expected that due attention will ever be paid to the interests of any class which is not duly represented in the government of the country. If women had possessed the franchise, the Contagious Diseases Acts could not have been passed. I have preferred in this Essay to treat these Acts as a matter affecting the whole community rather than as one which concerns women particularly, inasmuch as the claims which women and men have to jury trial and to all constitutional rights are equal, and rest on the same foundation, which cannot be destroyed for one sex only. I can never view this question as fundamentally any more a woman’s question than it is a man’s. These Acts secure the enslavement of women and the increased immorality of men; and history and experience alike teach us that these two results are never separated. Slavery and immorality lead to degradation, political ruin, and intellectual decay, and therefore it is that these Acts are a question for the whole nation at large. Yet we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that these Acts of Parliament in the first instance affect women only; it is by their necessary consequences, not by their immediate action, that men also are affected.