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 Rh in the most natural manner the woman's side of life. The trend of argument is mainly in one direction. While a few cynics gibe at love and conjugal felicity, the mass of poets and philosophers unite in extolling wedlock. Some praise its pleasures, others its duties, and others again merely point out with Euripides that, as children cannot be bought with gold or silver, there is no way of acquiring these coveted possessions save by the help of women. Now and then a rare word of sympathy is flung to the wife, as in those touching lines of Sophocles upon the young girls sold in their "gleeful maidenhood" to sad or shameful marriage-beds. But the important thing to be achieved is the welfare and happiness of men. The welfare and happiness of women are supposed—not without reason—to follow as a necessary sequence; but this is a point which excites no very deep concern.

Catholic Christendom throughout the Middle Ages, and long afterwards, offered one practical solution to the problem of unmated and unprotected womanhood,—the convent. The girl robbed of all hope of marriage by bitter stress