Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/253

 appear in Court have no reason to believe their present judges so perfect that no change for the better could possibly be effected. The exclusion of women from the office of judge and juror makes it quite impossible for women to be tried by their peers in the complete sense of that expression, and doubtless many times injustice is done because the woman prefers to be misunderstood and to suffer rather than explain to a company of men, with no woman present, all the details of her case.

One thing is quite certain: that women on the bench and in the jury-box would use the last syllable of the law to aid them in more justly apportioning the blame in all those cases of immorality and its consequences in which one partner to the act of both seems to get off so lightly. It is true that the utmost the law can do is not much, but when the deserted unmarried wife appeared before the Court for some means of support, the women magistrates would surely show more interest in the whereabouts of the father than seems to move those in authority to-day. The circumstances of the lives of women being more intimately known to them than to men, they would be able better to measure the strength of the temptation to wrongdoing which has brought their unfortunate sisters within the clutches of the law. In