one party to the engagement, there is no suggestion of guilt or offence in the other party—the woman; yet the consequences of guilt and offence have been transferred to her shoulders, simply, it seems to me, because the guilty and offending party, being the stronger, declined to bear them himself. And woman's code of honour and morals being essentially a servile code, designed for the benefit of those in authority over her, she accepts the position without protest and takes shame to herself for the fault of another person. The first provision of a wider code—a code drawn up by herself—must be that she will only accept responsibility for her own actions. Until she has taken her stand on that principle she cannot hope for a freedom that is real, even a material freedom. At present her position, in this respect, is analogous to that of the mediæval whipping-boy or those slaves of antiquity who were liable to be put to death for the sins of their masters—a position entirely incompatible with the most elementary ideas of liberty and justice. The chaste and virtuous Lucrece whose untimely fate so distraught our youthful brains was not so much the victim of one man's evil passions
