The part of the procession which next drew near seemed to be nearly as numerous as the “old maids.” With a sudden shock, I saw that it was the “courtesans,” or rather those who had been courtesans, for I remembered that Woman had, by an irrevocable edict, forever banished the name and calling of the courtesan from the earth. But if the contemplation of the soul-wearying burdens borne by the uncomplaining “old maids” produced in the men who gazed upon them the compunctions of pity and remorse, the scarred and wasted wrecks of man’s passion which now passed in long review before him, reproached him with a poignancy ten-fold greater. These women, bearing the ineffaceable marks of man’s ravages, had differed, it appeared, only by an accident from those whom he esteemed pure. Dragged from the garden of purity by man’s own perfidy, they had been doomed without hope of forgiveness, to forever minister to his lust. Disregarding for ages the example and spirit of the Great Teacher, man had thrust the victims he had thus made, deeper and deeper into the blackness of a bottomless pit. I turned away my head with a shudder from a spectacle before which all men stood in awful condemnation! Fully two-thirds of the procession had passed by, and the woman’s panorama had shown nothing but unmerited contumely or ruthless devastation. What could there be left? It was a band of exceedingly frail and wasted women, that I next looked upon. Feeble invalids they appeared with but a remnant of days before them. Borne down by disease they dragged out lives of continual pain. The ashes of hope were in their eyes, the ashes of beauty were in their faces, and the ashes of strength were in their feeble frames. These, it appeared, were women who had married young profligates, “to save them.” They looked like flowers which had been hopelessly blasted by a deadly, blighting wind. The fearful scars and moral pollution which had been in the souls of their husbands, had been wrecked upon them to the uttermost, and there had been no voice to protest, no sheltering arm to interpose. These were followed by a very small band of women who were said to have been happily married. But the chains of these seemed in many respects as heavy, though a little more gilded, than those of the women who had preceded them. They appeared to have paid their all for the narrow happiness which they enjoyed, and it had been fraught with deadly perils, against which they had had no adequate protection. Even some of these, it seemed, had been bartered for gold or titles, and only a filmy legal fiction stood between them and the name and stain of the concubine. Following them closely was the army of married women, who, unfortunately mismated or overborne by the evils of undesired maternity and its dire accompaniment, poverty, formed the strong rank and file of the Great Woman’s Strike.