police courts are full of disclosures of
ill-treatment of women by their husbands, and year by year our
own courts are more densely thronged by women asking safety from
the brutality of men who at the altar have vowed to "love, honor
and protect" them. In nearly all these cases, the men who are
brought into our courts on the charge of maltreating women are of
foreign birth who have been born and brought up under the
spiritual guidance of such clergymen as the Rev. Knox-Little, who
tell them, as he told the audience of women to whom he preached
in this city: "To her husband a wife owes the duty of unqualified
obedience. There is _no crime that a man can commit which
justifies his wife in leaving him_ or applying for that monstrous
thing, a divorce. It is her duty to submit herself to him
_always_, and no crime he can commit justifies her lack of
obedience. If he is a bad or wicked man she may gently
remonstrate with him, but disobey him, never." Again, addressing
his audience at St. Clement's, he says: "You may marry a bad man,
but what of that? You had no right to marry a bad man. If you
knew it, you deserved it. If you did not know it, you must endure
it all the same. You can pray for him, and perhaps he will
reform; but leave him--never. Never think of that accursed
thing--divorce. Divorce breaks up families--families build up the
church. The Christian woman lives to build up the church." This
is the sort of sermonizing, reiterated from year to year, that
makes brutes of Englishmen, of all classes, and sinks the average
English woman to the condition of a child-bearing slave,
valuable, mostly, for the number of children she brings her
husband. She is permitted to hold no opinion unaccepted by her
master, denied all reason and forced to frequent churches where
she is forbidden the exercise of her common-sense, and where she
is told: "Men are logical; women lack this quality, but have an
intricacy of thought. There are those who think that women can be
taught logic; this is a mistake. They can never, by any process
of education, arrive at the same mental status as that enjoyed by
man; but they have a quickness of apprehension--what is usually
called leaping at conclusions--that is astonishing."

Divorce is a question over which woman now disputes