The Lady Francis Balfour is speaking. To the Bishop of Birmingham she is saying: “Let me take a concrete case. You may have a woman who is a Christian and you may have her husband ill using her in some sort of way. We have had evidence put before us, which is of course known to us all, that there are even men who live on the prostitution of their wives. Now, is that not a contract which has been broken on the one side in the worst possible way? Are they twain one flesh? Is that for better and for worse?” Bishop of Birmingham: “Yes, I am afraid so.” Lady Francis Balfour: “And is that wife to stick to that husband, she being a Christian, and to do as he commands her?” Bishop of Birmingham: “Yes, I am afraid so.” WHAT WOULD MEN HAVE DONE? That’s all, gentlemen. You and I will go. There will be other witnesses and days of testimony. But isn’t this enough? What would you yourselves do if your church and your state handed you over body and soul, like this, to any other human being to have and to hold and to exercise this power and dominion over you? I don’t believe you’d ever stop at all to parade and respectfully to petition about it. I think you’d be mobbing and rioting and bombing right away. And if they had arrested you and put you in Holloway Jail, you’d have raised the roof and torn down the whole social structure! Well, in England women broke windows. In Germany, as I have said, they broke more. “Your statutes have limited the liberties of the woman who marries. Then you shall never limit us,” was the gauntlet thrown down to society by the extremists. They were university women, some of them with doctor of philosophy degrees, who scathingly refused the ring and faced free love instead. They were quite frank about it—and quite fearless. I have talked with them there in Berlin. They looked at me as clear eyed, when they told me of what they had done, as any women who have walked ringed and veiled down a church aisle into legal wedlock. Well, they seemed to think it was the only way, to act directly instead of to agitate. And they got out the book of the church ritual that they had repudiated. And they turned to a paragraph and said to me, Read. And I read: “The woman’s will, as God says, shall be subject to the man and he shall be her master: that is, the woman shall not live according to her free will ... and must neither begin nor complete anything without the man. Where he is, there must she be and bend before him as her master, whom she shall fear and to whom she shall be subject and obedient.” So I write it here, gentlemen, for you to see. And again, I submit, What would you do if they had said it that way to you? Be fair. Could any ring have held you?