If the nineteenth century was a time of education for women, it was no less a time of education for men. We have not yet arrived at an equal moral standard for men and women, but we have travelled a long way on the road leading to it. A George I. openly surrounding himself with mistresses, and shutting up his wife for life in a fortress for levity of behaviour; a George IV. who measured with similar inequality his own and his wife's connubial transgressions, would not be tolerated in the England of the twentieth century. The awakening of women to a sense of their wrongs before the law was a leading feature of the women's movement in the early nineteenth century. The Hon. Mrs. Norton, the beautiful and gifted daughter of Tom Sheridan, a reigning toast, a society beauty, and with literary accomplishments sufficient to secure her an independent income from her pen, was subjected to every sort of humiliation and anguish as a wife and mother which the mean and cruel nature of her husband could devise. Mr. Norton brought an action against Lord Melbourne for the seduction of his wife, and the jury decided without leaving the box that Lord Melbourne was wholly innocent. This did not prevent the petty malice of her husband from depriving Mrs. Norton entirely of her three infant children, one of whom died from an accident which ought never to have happened if the child had been duly cared for. To read her life[7] is comparable to being present at a vivisection. Mrs. Norton had one weapon. She could make herself heard; she wrote a pamphlet in 1836 called "_The Natural Claim of a Mother to the Custody of her Children as affected by the Common Law Right of the Father_." One result which followed from Mrs. Norton's sufferings, coupled with her power of giving public expression to them, was the passing of Serjeant Talfourd's Act in 1839, called the Infants' Custody Act, giving a mother the right of access to her children until they are seven years old. This is the first inroad on the monopoly on the part of the father of absolute control over his children created by the English law. The division of legal rights over their children between fathers and mothers has been described by a lawyer as extremely simple--the fathers have all and the mothers none. Serjeant Talfourd's Act did not do much to redress this gross injustice; but it did something, and marks the beginning of a new epoch.