at the matrons, who throng the forum, for “running into public and addressing other women’s husbands.” It “does not concern them what laws are passed or repealed.” He bewails the “good old days” when women were forced to obey their fathers, brothers, or husbands. “Now they are so lost to a sense of decency as to ask favors of other men.” “Women,” he says, “bear law with impatience.” They long for liberty, which is not good for them. With all the old restrictions, it is difficult to keep them within bounds. “The moment they have arrived at equality they will be our superiors”--a dangerous admission surely. He calls the affair a sedition, an insurrection, a secession of women. But the matrons had some able defenders. Lucius Valerius, who had asked the repeal of this obnoxious law, spoke for them. He objects to calling a natural request by such hard names, and quotes from antiquity to prove that it is not a new thing for Roman matrons to come out in public, as they have often done so in the interest of the State, and “always to its advantage.” He recalls the various times when they saved Rome, and refers to the generosity with which they invariably responded to a call for help. No one objected when they appeared for the general good; why should they be censured when they asked a favor for themselves? In reply to the accusation of extravagance, he says: “When you wear purple on your own robe, why will you not permit your wife a purple mantle?”... “Will you spend more on your horse than on your wife?” Then he asks why women who have always been noted for modesty should lose it now through the repeal of a law that has not been in existence more than twenty years. One is tempted to quote at length from these speeches, because they show us how the Romans discussed certain questions that are familiar to-day. To be sure, it was only a woman’s privilege of dressing as she chose that they were considering, but it really involved her right to ask anything which her lord and master did not freely accord. We hear practically the same arguments, the same fears, the same special pleadings on both sides, at each new step in the social advancement of women.