Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/55

 law breaches of the moral rules which ought to govern the relation between the sexes has been made again and again, and has—at any rate where man and woman alike were consenting parties—ended in failure, and frequently been the parent of evils more disastrous than the wrong-doing which it was meant to cure. No one in modem times would wish to reproduce in any town the legislation of Calvin in Geneva. The inhabitants of New England would to-day refuse to bear, and would rightly refuse to bear, the stem laws of their Puritan forefathers. The second remark is that the belief in the cure of moral evils by the force of law arises from the constant confusion between the spheres, which often overlap, of morality and law. The forgetfulness of this distinction has, as the history of every age bears witness, given birth on the one hand to the Pharisaism which teaches that the fulfilment of the law is the same thing as the performance of every moral and religious duty, and, on the other hand, to the sentimentality which teaches, and never taught with greater audacity and with worse effects than to-day, that a man's acts, how-