Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/56

 lawless, may receive pardon or eulogy if only they can by any possibility be attributed to an innocent—e.g., a religious or a political—motive. We condemn the law which hangs a murderer, we applaud the murderer who arrogates the name of an assassin. It is, let me lastly remark, certain that if in the England of to-day respectable women united in condemning severely what is generally termed 'immorality,' they could produce an effect greater by far than anything which could result from any sort of Parliament. If, to take one example, the seducer of any girl found that, as a rule, his sin excluded him from marriage with any woman of character, the penalty would be sufficient to work a transformation in general opinion as to the heinousness of his offence. But everybody knows that in this matter, and in others respecting the relation of the sexes, the judgment and the conduct of even the best women is not always uniform. They occasionally, at least, condemn the seducer less severely than his victim. It is common knowledge that respectable women do not err on the side of leniency in judging the errors of their own