. 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 clashes 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
