Perhaps it may be said without much exaggeration, that the cure for social ills is the clear realisation of their existence. But the prescription seems simpler than it really is. People are indeed ready enough to cry out against the innumerable progeny of evils that spring out of some great fundamental wrong; but it sometimes takes centuries before a whole nation comes to recognise that parent-wrong, in its relationship with its vast and objectionable family. The individuals of that family differ among themselves, and differ according to the conditions of their age, so that in (say) the fifteenth century, they will be fathered on one institution, and in the sixteenth, mankind will find some other contemporary abuse on which to lay the blame of their birth. Meanwhile, the guilty ancestor of them all lies cherished in the very heart of the society that it ruins. We have seen that among these patriarchs of evil, the subjection of women must be classed. As in the case of a sufferer from blood-poisoning, some of the symptoms may be mitigated, but new distresses will follow the supposed cures, until the poison itself is driven out of the system.

It has often been objected: “Granting that these evils are born of that particular parent, how can they be cured?”