When we come to the courts of law the hopeless incompatibility of inequality of income with justice is so plain that you must have been struck by it if you ever notice such things. The very first condition of legal justice is that it shall be no respecter of persons; that it shall hold the balance impartially between the laborer’s wife and the millionairess; and that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty except by the verdict of a jury of her peers, meaning her equals. Now no laborer is ever tried by a jury of his peers: he is tried by a jury of ratepayers who have a very strong class prejudice against him because they have larger incomes, and consider themselves better men on that account. Even a rich man tried by a common jury has to reckon with their envy as well as their subservience to wealth. Thus it is a common saying with us that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. This is not strictly true: the law is the same for everybody: it is the incomes that need changing. The civil law by which contracts are enforced, and redress given for slanders and injuries that are not dealt with by the police, requires so much legal knowledge and artistic eloquence to set it in motion that an ordinary woman with no legal knowledge or eloquence can get the benefit of it only by employing lawyers whom she has to pay very highly, which means, of course, that the rich woman can afford to go to law and the poor woman cannot. The rich woman can terrorize the poor woman by threatening to go to law with her if her demands are not complied with. She can disregard the poor woman’s rights, and tell her that if she is dissatisfied she can take her complaint into court, knowing very well that her victim’s poverty and ignorance will prevent her from obtaining proper legal advice and protection. When a rich woman takes a fancy to a poor woman’s husband, and persuades him to abandon her, she can practically buy him by starving the abandoned wife into divorcing him for a sufficient allowance. In America, where the wife can sue for damages, the price of the divorce is higher: that is all. When the abandoned wife cannot be starved into the divorce court she can stand out for an exorbitant price before setting her husband free to remarry; and an abandoned husband can sell out likewise. Men and women now trap one another into marriage with this object to such an extent that in some States the word alimony has come to mean simply blackmail. Mind: I am not disparaging either divorce or alimony. What is wrong is that any woman should by mere superiority of income be able to make another woman’s husband much more comfortable than his wife can, or that any man should be able to offer another man’s wife luxuries that her husband cannot afford: in short, that money should have any weight whatever either in contracting or dissolving a marriage.