Page:The Legal Subjection of Men.djvu/79

 people in the British Islands, America and the British Colonies is a subject of the deepest interest, but not one lending itself to cursory treatment. A photograph of the outer surface—a picture of the facts of the law is all that has been attempted here.

To confine our attention to the strictly necessary, it will suffice to remind the reader that the ordinary motives which induce the more selfish members of any privileged class to use a privilege, exist in the case of women. Many slave-owners were as indulgent as St. Clair, but many were like Legree.

The chief impelling motives appear to be:—

1. A desire for economic advantage to get money without trouble; to exploit the labour of the male slave, enthralled by the law—this works quite as well to impel a woman as a man to use an unjust power. It is the predatory instinct present in pirates, robbers and criminals of all classes.

2. A desire to domineer and oppress. This impulse as distinguished from ordinary revengefulness is, some think, stronger in women than in men. No one will deny its existence in both men and women, whatever be its special cause.

3. Malignity and vindictiveness. Inordinate revenge for real or fancied wrongs, disproportioned vindictiveness for the chance slights of a complex social life may be safely reckoned on to actuate the bitterer section of a female noblesse as well as a male one. If power does not corrupt, at least it gives room for corruption to spread.

Modern life among English speaking people, while releasing women from male guidance, has, by individualising women, multiplied the occasions of conflict between members of the two sexes. Different ideals and tests of action (women judge men by one standard and men judge women by another), the result of natural divergencies, as well as of education, absence of sex-illusion on the female side and its presence on the male side, add to these occasions.