guarded from all pain, shielded from all anxiety, kept, innocent on all
questions of sex, was no preparation for married existence, and left me
defenceless to face a rude awakening. Looking back on it all, I
deliberately say that no more fatal blunder can be made than to train a
girl to womanhood in ignorance of all life's duties and burdens, and
then to let her face them for the first time away from all the old
associations, the old helps, the old refuge on the mother's breast.
That "perfect innocence" may be very beautiful, but it is a perilous
possession, and Eve should have the knowledge of good and evil ere she
wanders forth from the paradise of a mother's love. Many an unhappy
marriage dates from its very beginning, from the terrible shock to a
young girl's sensitive modesty and pride, her helpless bewilderment and
fear. Men, with their public school and college education, or the
knowledge that comes by living in the outside world, may find it hard
to realise the possibility of such infantile ignorance in many girls.
None the less, such ignorance is a fact in the case of some girls at
least, and no mother should let her daughter, blindfold, slip her neck
under the marriage yoke.

Before leaving the harbourage of girlhood to set sail on the troublous
sea of life, there is an occurrence of which I must make mention, as
it marks my first awakening of interest in the outer world of
political struggle. In the autumn of 1867 my mother and I were staying
with some dear friends of ours, the Robertses, at Pendleton, near
Manchester. Mr. Roberts was "the poor man's lawyer," in the
affectionate phrase used of him by many a hundred men. He was a close
friend of Ernest Jones, and was always ready to fight a poor man's
battle without fee. He worked hard in the agitation which saved women
from working in the mines, and I have heard him tell how he had seen
them toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely
reaching to their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalised out of all
womanly decency and grace; and how he had seen little children working
there too, babies of three and four set to watch a door, and falling
asleep at their work to be roused by curse and kick to the unfair
toil. The old man's eye would begin to flash and his voice to rise as
he told of these horrors, and then his face would soften as he added
that, after it was all over and the slavery was put an end to, as he
went through a coal district the wome