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The absence of any compulsory power over a woman's person or a married woman's property and the bias of the courts amounts practically to a licence for her to break any contract at pleasure. This is quite apart from the peculiar privilege of women to waste a man's time and money in a pretended engagement, possibilypossibly [sic] to lure on a more wealthy lover—and to be exempt from penalty. Their privilege to commit perjury and slander with impunity plays a great part in the decision of any case in which a woman's contract is concerned. All stockbrokers, insurance agents, solicitors, and bankers, and business men generally, know how hopeless, as a rule, is any prospect of getting a contract enforced against a woman. As a rule it is best to compromise or submit to injustice rather than try it out with an adversary privileged to use loaded dice.

Precisely as in the Criminal Law, there is no real remedy against any fraud not of extraordinary magnitude and clearness of proof, perpetrated by a woman on a man.

A notorious female blackmailer brings lying accusations, suing on breach of promise of marriage, against a prominent Conservative member of Parliament. She loses her suit as she has to admit on cross-examination that she a few months previously, had extorted £5,000 from another victim of a similar suit, which was hushed up. But her victim could not get back his £5,000—and no one suggested civil or criminal process against her.

The feminine privilege of seduction extends also to the civil Courts. No civil action lies against any woman of full age for the seduction of a minor, not even if her doings be a device to entrap him by threats of scandal