Milton also discoursed learnedly, but self-interestedly, concerning divorce, claiming for the husband a privilege and option which he utterly denied to the wife:—“... the power and arbitrement of divorce from the master of the family, into whose hands God and the law of all nations had put it ... that right which God from the beginning had entrusted to the husband.”—(“The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.”) It was this same mediæval moralist who trained his daughters in the pronunciation of various languages, that they might minister to his comfort by reading to him in those tongues; while he carefully withheld from them any knowledge of the meaning of the words they were uttering. Could a greater insult or a more degrading office be inflicted on a cultured human intellect? Small wonder that his daughters were sufficiently “undutiful and unkind”—as Milton styled it—to leave him some years before his death. That the possessor of the same virile intellect which penned the “Areopagitica,” with its brave freedom, could tolerate and promulgate the servitude and degradation of one half of humanity indicates in him a mental darkness as gross and as pitiable as his physical blindness. 6, 7.—“... _sanctimonious name Of ‘woman’s duty’_ ...” “Hitherto the world has been governed by brute force only, which means that the stronger animal, man, has kept the weaker in subjection, allowing her to live only in so far as she ministered to his comforts; that he has not unnaturally made laws and fixed customs to suit his own pleasure and convenience, always at the expense of the woman; and, what is worse, that he has in all countries given a religious sanction to his vices, in order to bend the woman to his wishes.... I might also add that all cruel customs relating to woman have been imposed upon her under the guise of religion, and hence, though so injurious and baneful to herself, she is even slower to change them than the man. There is hardly any cruel wrong which has been inflicted in the course of ages by man upon his fellow-man that has not been justified by an appeal to religion.”—Mrs. Pechey Phipson, M.D. (“Address to the Hindoos of Bombay”). _Id._... “There is nothing which men so easily learn as this self-worship: all privileged persons, and all privileged classes, have had it.... Philosophy and religion, instead of keeping it in check, are generally suborned to defend it.”—J. S. Mill (“The Subjection of Women,” p. 77).