THE LEGAL SUBJECTION OF MEN.
I. THE LEGEND.
John Stuart Mill is dead! but his eloquent wail of the subjection of women is never let die—it rings in our ears every day. It is solemn, it is pathetic; it overflows with the chivalric sentiment which Mill professes to repudiate as out of date, like the clanship and hospitality of the wandering Arab, but which nevertheless, is so strongly developed in the average male. It has become the gospel of women's pretended wrongs, and has caused the ingenuous youth of Oxford and Cambridge to blush for their fellow males. The only objection that the lawyers of the present year of grace can raise to it is that it is really the reverse of legal truth.
But even apart from the late John Stuart Mill, for considerably more than a generation past—indeed, one may say, more or less from the beginning of the present century—mankind, in this and some other countries, has had sedulously instilled into its mind the notion that the female sex is labouring under a grievous oppression at the hands of the tyrant male. In the present day this opinion has acquired the character of an axiom which few people think of disputing. Every occurrence bearing upon the social or economical relation of the sexes is judged in the light of this fixed idea. The press in general voices the view of public opinion with the result that the assumption in question is continually being reiterated. The moral of the injustice exercised by man upon woman is insisted upon with all the devices of rhetoric, and every chance occurrence is eagerly seized
