cted by their relations to other individuals who
are fellow members of the nation with them. That any person should be
dependent for the means of support upon another would be shocking to
the moral sense as well as indefensible on any rational social theory.
What would become of personal liberty and dignity under such an
arrangement? I am aware that you called yourselves free in the
nineteenth century. The meaning of the word could not then, however,
have been at all what it is at present, or you certainly would not
have applied it to a society of which nearly every member was in a
position of galling personal dependence upon others as to the very
means of life, the poor upon the rich, or employed upon employer,
women upon men, children upon parents. Instead of distributing the
product of the nation directly to its members, which would seem the
most natural and obvious method, it would actually appear that you had
given your minds to devising a plan of hand to hand distribution,
involving the maximum of personal humiliation to all classes of
recipients.

"As regards the dependence of women upon men for support, which then
was usual, of course, natural attraction in case of marriages of love
must often have made it endurable, though for spirited women I should
fancy it must always have remained humiliating. What, then, must it
have been in the innumerable cases where women, with or without the
form of marriage, had to sell themselves to men to get their living?
Even your contemporaries, callous as they were to most of the
revolting aspects of their society, seem to have had an idea that this
was not quite as it should be; but, it was still only for pity's sake
that they deplored the lot of the women. It did not occur to them that
it was robbery as well as cruelty when men seized for themselves the
whole product of the world and left women to beg and wheedle for their
share. Why--but bless me, Mr. West, I am really running on at a
remarkable rate, just as if the robbery, the sorrow, and the shame
which those poor women endured were not over a century since, or as if
you were responsible for what you no doubt deplored as much as I do."

"I must bear my share of responsibility for the world as it then was,"
I replied. "All I can say in extenuation is that until the nation was
ripe for the present system of organized production and distribution,
no radical improvement in the position of woman was possible. The root
of her