“He has made me dream that it was meant for a higher and stronger purpose, that gift which came not from man but from God! It was meant to enable me to rouse the hearts of others, to examine into all the gross injustice of these laws, to ask the nation of gallant gentlemen whose countrywoman I am, for once to hear a woman’s pleading on the subject. Not because I deserve more at their hands than other women. Well I know, on the contrary, how many hundreds, infinitely better than I,—more pious, more patient, and less rash under injury,—have watered their bread with tears! My plea to attention is, that in pleading for myself I am able to plead for all these others. Not that my sufferings or my deserts are greater than theirs, but that I combine, with the fact of having suffered wrong, the power to comment on and explain the cause of that wrong, which few women are able to do.” Mrs. Norton knew what was the state of the law, having suffered cruelly from it, and there was, in her day, very little chance of any women knowing the law, except through just such personal bitter suffering. Few women, as she truly said, could combine this knowledge with the powers of exposition, agitation and eloquence which so distinguished her. This is less true now than it was then. Progressive women are determined that it shall cease to be true altogether. They are increasingly devoting themselves to studying the complex social system into which they are born and are themselves introducing new lives; they are supplementing the intuitions of motherhood with the reasonings of science; they are finding in the knowledge of racial poisons justification for what has hitherto been simple racial instinct. The defilement or the abuse of marriage by men, which has hitherto been regarded as venial, because the wife and child were property, acquire quite a different colour when women as well as men know the effects upon the race. It is possible to tell devoted ignorant wives that it is their part to endure all and never to refuse. Medical men have kept silence, priests have preached and lawyers have advised submission, and ignorant mothers have handed on these precepts to their daughters. “La femme est née pour souffrir,” says one mother of daughters; and the more woman suffers, the more truly womanly she is. “Entbehren sollst du,” quotes the anti-suffragist,—to women only,—and sacrifice, _quâ_ sacrifice, has been made the woman’s idol. But when she gets to know that the sacrifice is depriving her of motherhood or poisoning the children to come, how then? Will she be so much in love with sacrifice? Can anyone believe that a woman will retain the old attitude towards marriage after she has learnt the causes of many of the congenital diseases of children, or of what are ironically termed “diseases of women”? Whatever the view of enlightened women will be (and