No doubt, the progress of events is slow, like the working of the laws of gravitation generally.  Certainly there has been but little change in the legal position of women since China was in its prime, until within the last half century.  Lawyers admit that the fundamental theory of English and Oriental law is the same on this point:  Man and wife are one, and that one is the husband.  It is the oldest of legal traditions.  When Blackstone declares that “the very being and existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage,” and American Kent echoes that “her legal existence and authority are in a manner lost;” when Petersdorff asserts that “the husband has the right of imposing such corporeal restraints as he may deem necessary,” and Bacon that “the husband hath, by law, power and dominion over his wife, and may keep her by force within the bounds of duty, and may beat her, but not in a violent or cruel manner;” when Mr. Justice Coleridge rules that the husband, in certain cases, “has a right to confine his wife in his own dwelling-house, and restrain her from liberty for an indefinite time,” and Baron Alderson sums it all up tersely, “The wife is only the servant of her husband,”—­these high authorities simply reaffirm the dogma of the Gentoo code, four thousand years old and more:  “A man, both day and night, must keep his wife so much in subjection that she by no means be mistress of her own actions.  If the wife have her own free will, notwithstanding she be of a superior caste, she will behave amiss.”

Yet behind these unchanging institutions, a pressure has been for centuries becoming concentrated, which, now that it has begun to act, is threatening to overthrow them all.  It has not yet operated very visibly in the Old World, where, even in England, the majority of women have not till lately mastered the alphabet sufficiently to sign their own names in the marriage register.  But in this country the vast changes of the last few years are already a matter of history.  No trumpet has been sounded, no earthquake has been felt, while State after State has ushered into legal existence one half of the population within its borders.  Surely, here and now, might poor M. Marechal exclaim, the bitter fruits of the original seed appear.  The sad question recurs, Whether women ought ever to have tasted of the alphabet.

It is true that Eve ruined us all, according to theology, without knowing her letters.  Still there is something to be said in defence of that venerable ancestress.  The Veronese lady, Isotta Nogarola, five hundred and thirty-six of whose learned epistles were preserved by De Thou, composed a dialogue on the question, Whether Adam or Eve had committed the greater sin.  But Ludovico Domenichi, in his “Dialogue on the Nobleness of Women,” maintains that Eve did not sin at all, because she was not even created when Adam was told not to eat the apple.  It was “in Adam all died,” he shrewdly says; nobody died in Eve:  which looks plausible.  Be that as it may, Eve’s daughters are in danger of swallowing a whole harvest of forbidden fruit, in these revolutionary days, unless something be done to cut off the supply.