away. Year by year new avenues of employment have been opened up to women. One of the first acts of Mr. Fawcett when he became Postmaster-General was to admit them to the service of the State. Parliament, under the wise guidance of Mr. Forster, decided to give them a fair share of the public endowments set aside for secondary education. They were afterwards admitted to the benefits of University education; one of the learned professions--that of medicine--was thrown open to them; and political enfranchisement is even within their reach. But in 1883 the law for the first time recognised the fact that married women could hold property, and abandoned the barbaric doctrine that for women matrimony implied confiscation. The Married Women’s Property Act, which was passed by Mr. Osborne Morgan, did for the women of the people by law, what was done for women of the upper classes by marriage settlements. It gave a married woman an absolute right to her earnings, so that her husband could no longer seize them under his _jus mariti_. It gave her, in the absence of settlements, an indefeasible right to any property she might have before or that might come to her after marriage, so that she could use it as she pleased without her husband’s interference. It made her contract as regards her own estate, as binding as if she were a man, quite irrespective of her husband’s consent. On the other hand, it of course released the husband from liability for all his wife’s debts, unless she contracted them as his agent. That such an Act should have been passed by a Parliament in which women were not represented, and in which, till recently, arguments in favour of the emancipation of women from a state of tutelage were disposed of by coarse jokes, speaks well for the chivalry and high sense of justice that characterise British manhood.[184]