Page:The Legal Subjection of Men.djvu/84

 judges as their obsequious humble servants, what more could they expect to obtain, even if they had the suffrage?

As regards the occasional cases of the ill-treatment of women by men, especially wife assaults and such like, these may be traced largely to the infamous state of the law we have described. Where the law practically refuses justice to one section of the community against another, it is only "human nature" (if we may employ that much-abused phrase) that occasionally members of the section to which justice is refused should be found to take the matter into their own hands, and attempt to redress the balance, by acts, amounting sometimes to brutality. It were surely more reasonable, rather than to expend indignation and ferocity on the individual offender, to seek out and remedy the underlying cause of the offence. Give men reasonable justice as against women, cease to trample underfoot every principle of equity and fair play at the behest of feminist shrieks, and the excuse, or at least, palliation which now undoubtedly exists for any sporadic brutality on the part of men, and especially husbands, of which women may be the victims, would be done away with. Whilst the law remains as it is women deserve scant pity if they do on rare occasions get the worst of it in their dealings with men.

In the foregoing pages we have set forth the respective legal position of the sexes as it now stands. Our aim in doing so has been, by spreading knowledge of the facts of the case, to prevent uninformed though otherwise fair-minded persons from falling a prey to the maudlin rant of demagogic charlatans (male and female), ignorant of law and as destitute of the capacity of independent judgment on any subject as they are of any impartial sense of justice, who so frequently deliver themselves in press and on platform on the subject of the "wrongs of woman."