Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/103

 husbands, who hold them as property, and have towards them certain legal responsibilities, of a nature somewhat analogous to those they have towards other living and sentient pieces of property, The State has always dimly known that in the quality of its citizens lay its true and lasting wealth; but penal laws, which used actually to mutilate men and women, and which still tend to reduce their vitality and to drive them to imbecility and madness, are plain witnesses of how imperfectly this truth has been grasped. Improvements in these respects are, however, on the way. This is said to be the age of the child, and through the child it is becoming also the age of the mother.

In England, at the present day, a working man has almost absolute power over his wife. That he uses this power in the main as humanely as he does, is a proof of how much better men are than the laws which they make or tolerate, and of how much real affection there is between men and women. The fact remains that, especially among working people, where the woman can have no money of her own unless she is in a position to earn it, the husband has the most awful powers of inflicting torture and wretchedness upon his whole family, and that it is distinctly safer for a working woman not to be married to the man she lives with. That working women so greatly prefer being married, again shows how strong in them is idealism and the love of social order. What may an Englishman do with his wife? His physical