me 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
may 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 disability, as you say, was her personal dependence upon man for
her livelihood, and I can imagine no other mode of social organization
than that you have adopted, which would have set woman free of man at
the same time that it set men free of one another. I suppose, by the
w