Page:The Diothas, or, A far look ahead (IA diothasorfarlook01macn).pdf/157

 under the dominion of manlier races, who had extirpated the disease with fire and steel.

The lesson was not lost upon the world. The purifying influence of woman was nowhere more conspicuously exerted than in the legislation that tended to the protection of the sex that too long had been the slave or victim, despised or petted or flattered, of the coarser sex. Seduction was treated as a serious crime,—as, in certain cases, the basest and most cruel of crimes. The seducer was not, indeed, compelled to marry his victim, but was given the option between such reparation and being rendered incapable of offending again in that way. If one, or both, of the guilty parties was already married, both were purged from the land, unless it could be proved that one had sinned in ignorance.

Nor were these laws allowed to remain inoperative. The woman was tried by a judge and jury of her own sex, who generally proved inexorable in vindicating the outraged dignity of womanhood. The condemnation of the woman necessarily drew after it that of the man. The stronger sex thus learned to be extremely guarded in its intercourse with the sex so long regarded as the lawful prey of the stronger.

The state of things in which such laws had been necessary had, however, at the period of which I am writing, become as remote as is to us the society of the palæolithic period. Offences that society now easily condones had become practically impossible, if for no other reason, because the idea of them would have aroused as instinctive an abhorrence as among us would the idea of dining on a tender infant.