of which Lucretias and Cornelias are made is not the stuff to bear habitual oppression silently, beyond a certain point. It was doubtless this oppression that was responsible for a startling epidemic of husband-poisoning in the fourth century before Christ. The women who prepared the drugs were betrayed by a maid, and one hundred and seventy matrons--some of them patricians--were found guilty. The leaders were forced to take their own poisons, and died with the calmness of Stoics. Two hundred years afterward there was another epidemic of the same sort, and many eminent men paid the penalty of their cruelties with their lives. This mode of redressing wrongs became too common to be passed to the account of individual crime. It was the protest of helpless ignorance that had found no other weapon. About this time, however, the Roman matrons took a more civilized and rational method of asserting their rights. It was an innovation to claim any, but they were too proud to accept the hopeless vassalage of the Athenian woman. Indignant at the inferiority of their condition, without recourse or refuge against cruelty and injustice, hampered by needless and petty restrictions, they rebelled at last. III One sees little clearly through the mists of two thousand years, and we know few details of what seems to have been the first concerted revolt on the part of women. The visible cause was a trivial one, but it was the proverbial last drop, and served at least to bring dismay into the councils of men, and afterward, possibly, reflection. The Roman woman was patriotic and quite ready, at need, to give all and ask nothing. When money was required to carry on the Punic wars, she poured out her jewels and personal treasures with lavish generosity; nor did she murmur when the Oppian law decreed that she must no longer wear purple or many-colored robes, that her gold ornaments must weigh no more than half an ounce, and that she must walk if she went out, as the use of a carriage in the city was a forbidden luxury. These were small privileges, but they were about all she had, and when the crisis was past, she asked a repeal of the decree. She met the usual rebuff of those who seek to regain a lost point. Men saw in such a request only an “irruption of female emancipators,” dangerous alike to religion and the State. Cato, the austere, refused a petition which he regarded as a subversion of order and a rebellion against lawful masters. He said that the claim of women to any rights or any voice in public affairs was a proof that men had lost their majesty as well as their authority; such a thing could not have happened if each one had kept his own wife in proper subjection. “Our privileges,” he continues, “overpowered at home by female contumacy, are, even here in the forum, spurned and trodden under foot”; indeed, he begins to fear that “the whole race of males may be utterly destroyed by a conspiracy of women.” He rails