to stop the sale of wives in Scotland and elsewhere in the island of the English (Pike, History of Crime in England, vol. i, p. 99).  The practice never quite died out, however, in remote country districts.

Such transactions have taken place even in London.  Thus in the Annual Register for 1767 (p. 99) we read:  “About three weeks ago a bricklayer’s laborer at Marylebone sold a woman, whom he had cohabited with for several years, to a fellow-workman for a quarter guinea and a gallon of beer.  The workman went off with the purchase, and she has since had the good fortune to have a legacy of L200, and some plate, left her by a deceased uncle in Devonshire.  The parties were married last Friday.”

The Rev. J. Edward Vaux (Church Folk-lore, second edition, p. 146) narrates two authentic cases in which women had been bought by their husbands in open market in the nineteenth century.  In one case the wife, with her own full consent, was brought to market with a halter round her neck, sold for half a crown, and led to her new home, twelve miles off by the new husband who had purchased her; in the other case a publican bought another man’s wife for a two-gallon jar of gin.

It is the same conception of woman as property which, even to the present, has caused the retention in many legal codes of clauses rendering a man liable to pay pecuniary damages to a woman, previously a virgin, whom he has intercourse with and subsequently forsakes (Natalie Fuchs, “Die Jungfernschaft im Recht und Sitte,” Sexual-Probleme, Feb., 1908).  The woman is “dishonored” by sexual intercourse, depreciated in her market value, exactly as a new garment becomes “second-hand,” even if it has but once been worn.  A man, on the other hand, would disdain the idea that his personal value could be diminished by any number of acts of sexual intercourse.

This fact has even led some to advocate the “abolition of physical virginity.”  Thus the German authoress of Una Poenitentium (1907), considering that the protection of a woman is by no means so well secured by a little piece of membrane as by the presence of a true and watchful soul inside, advocates the operation of removal of the hymen in childhood.  It is undoubtedly true that the undue importance attached to the hymen has led to a false conception of feminine “honor,” and to an unwholesome conception of feminine purity.

Custom and law are slowly changing in harmony with changed social conditions which no longer demand the subjection of women either in their own interests or in the interests of the community.  Concomitantly with these changes a different ideal of womanly personality is developing.  It is true that the ancient ideal of the lordship of the husband over the wife is still more or less consciously affirmed around us.  The husband frequently dictates to the wife what avocations