In spite of much obtuseness on the part of those bound by the iron fetters of convention, these individual cases suggest a practical method of procedure. For quite as pity and fierce maternal affection for their own children drove mothers all over the world to ostracize and cruelly punish the “bad woman” who would destroy the home by taking away the breadwinner and the father, so it is possible that, under the changed conditions of modern life, this same pity for little children, this same concern that, even if they are the children of the outcast, they must still be nourished and properly reared, will make good the former wrongs. There has certainly been a great modification of the harsh judgments meted out in such cases, as women all over the world have endeavored, through the old bungling method of trial and error, to deal justly with individual situations. Each case has been quietly judged by reference to an altered moral standard, for while the ethical code like the legal code stands in need of constant revision, the remodeling of the former is always private, tacit and informal in marked contrast to the public and ceremonious acts of law-makers and judges when the latter is changed. Such measure of success as the organized Woman’s Movement has attained in the direction of a larger justice has come through an overwhelming desire to cherish both the illegitimate child and his unfortunate mother. In addition to that, the widespread effort of modern women to obtain a recognized legal status for themselves and their own children has also been largely dependent upon this desire, at least in the beginnings of the movement. Women slowly had discovered that the severe attitude towards the harlot had not only become embodied in the statutory law concerning her, as thousands of court decisions every day bear testimony, but had become registered in the laws and social customs pertaining to good women as well; the Code Napoleon, which prohibited that search be made for the father of an illegitimate child, also denied the custody of her children to the married mother; those same states in which the laws considered a little girl of ten years the seducer of a man of well-known immorality, did not allow a married woman to hold her own property nor to retain her own wages.