The best way to avert such a struggle is to open the eyes of the thoughtlessly conventional people to the weakness of their position in a mere contest of recrimination.  Hitherto they have assumed that they have the advantage of coming into the field without a stain on their characters to combat libertines who have no character at all.  They conceive it to be their duty to throw mud; and they feel that even if the enemy can find any mud to throw, none of it will stick.  They are mistaken.  There will be plenty of that sort of ammunition in the other camp; and most of it will stick very hard indeed.  The moral is, do not throw any.  If we can imagine Shelley and Queen Victoria arguing out their differences in another world, we may be sure that the Queen has long ago found that she cannot settle the question by classing Shelley with George IV. as a bad man; and Shelley is not likely to have called her vile names on the general ground that as the economic dependence of women makes marriage a money bargain in which the man is the purchaser and the woman the purchased, there is no essential difference between a married woman and the woman of the streets.  Unfortunately, all the people whose methods of controversy are represented by our popular newspapers are not Queen Victorias and Shelleys.  A great mass of them, when their prejudices are challenged, have no other impulse than to call the challenger names, and, when the crowd seems to be on their side, to maltreat him personally or hand him over to the law, if he is vulnerable to it.  Therefore I cannot say that I have any certainty that the marriage question will be dealt with decently and tolerantly.  But dealt with it will be, decently or indecently; for the present state of things in England is too strained and mischievous to last.  Europe and America have left us a century behind in this matter.

A PROBABLE EFFECT OF GIVING WOMEN THE VOTE

The political emancipation of women is likely to lead to a comparatively stringent enforcement by law of sexual morality (that is why so many of us dread it); and this will soon compel us to consider what our sexual morality shall be.  At present a ridiculous distinction is made between vice and crime, in order that men may be vicious with impunity.  Adultery, for instance, though it is sometimes fiercely punished by giving an injured husband crushing damages in a divorce suit (injured wives are not considered in this way), is not now directly prosecuted; and this impunity extends to illicit relations between unmarried persons who have reached what is called the age of consent.  There are other matters, such as notification of contagious disease and solicitation, in which the hand of the law has been brought down on one sex only.  Outrages which were capital offences within the memory of persons still living when committed on women outside marriage, can still be inflicted by men on their wives