Page:The Legal Subjection of Men.djvu/77

 force of public opinion. All this, under the present dispensation, is arrayed against the man accused by a woman. The woman accuser wields the whole power of the Courts and the community, backed up by the press and public opinion. Her physical strength is an irrelevant matter, her real force lies in the state of public opinion before which the man becomes helpless. The power of the autocrat lies not in his physical strength, but in his ability to summon at a beck the resources of the State. The Czar of Russia is, and the Emperor Nero was, physically no stronger than the merest beggar. Catherine of Russia was physically weaker than the lowest of her grenadiers.

1. The law is not generally known by the vulgar, and lawyers, unless paid, are not usually accustomed to be expansive to the public at large on the subject of their information. Ignorance by the public of the law promotes litigation, and lawyers individually are not particularly oppressed by or frightened at the legal privileges of women. The technical skill of the lawyer and his powerful trade union usually enables him to get the best of the woman who contends with him in the law courts. Similarly, in former days, the lawyer took care to guard himself from being hurt by the feudal privileges of the noble, which weighed so heavily on the rest of the community.

2. Most women in England are still under the influence of the earlier polity of the Church and of Christendom. They do not dispute the duty of female subordination, and do not in fact as yet think of exercising the more flagrant of these new-fangled legal sex-privileges. The utmost pitch of domination that the majority have reached to is a noticeable increase in the display of overbearing manners towards their husbands, and other male dependents, and the palpable consciousness that the threat of a "public scene" will bring the scene-hating Englishman to his knees.