suffering. Few women, as she truly said, could combine this knowledge with the powers of exposition, agitation and eloquence which so distinguished her. This is less true now than it was then. Progressive women are determined that it shall cease to be true altogether. They are increasingly devoting themselves to studying the complex social system into which they are born and are themselves introducing new lives; they are supplementing the intuitions of motherhood with the reasonings of science; they are finding in the knowledge of racial poisons justification for what has hitherto been simple racial instinct. The defilement or the abuse of marriage by men, which has hitherto been regarded as venial, because the wife and child were property, acquire quite a different colour when women as well as men know the effects upon the race. It is possible to tell devoted ignorant wives that it is their part to endure all and never to refuse. Medical men have kept silence, priests have preached and lawyers have advised submission, and ignorant mothers have handed on these precepts to their daughters. "La femme est née pour souffrir," says one mother of daughters; and the more woman suffers, the more truly womanly she is. "Entbehren sollst du," quotes the anti-suffragist,—to women only,—and sacrifice, quâ sacrifice, has been made the woman's idol. But when she gets to know that the sacrifice is depriving her of motherhood or poisoning the children to come, how then? Will she be so much in love with sacrifice? Can anyone
