then, that the female sex, essentially maternal, is incapable, on this very ground, of possessing the same social and civil rights with himself. For men, who have always made laws according to their own idea, without consulting the other half of humanity, have for ages past sanctioned the notion of the inferiority of woman, basing themselves on the fact of her sex. Under the hypocritical pretence of protecting her, they have crushed her.".

Even as mother, how have they treated her? In England, as in many other lands, the married mother is not in law the parent until her husband's death, unless she has succeeded in obtaining either a separation order or a decree of divorce, entitling her to the custody of the children she has borne. They are not hers, but belong to her lord and master. A woman, who listened in the ladies' gallery of the House of Commons on March 26, 1884, to the foolish utterances of Members of Parliament with regard to the Guardianship of Infants' Bill, that afternoon before the House for second reading (a Bill which, had it become law, would have given equal parental rights to mother and father), gave expression to her indignant feelings in passionate verse:

"The bone of her bone you may take, and appeal
As of right to the law, is her own in a sense

Which can never be known

Save for this thing alone:

The child that is reared at her body's expense.

Her part is a growing burthen to bear,

Present labour and after care;

The prodigal need to give of her best,

To squander herself through the live-long hours.

A sacrifice of perennial birth,

A bondage keeping her soul to earth,

Keeping it down with a chain of flowers;

A swift life-current that sets to her breast,

And leaves her happy and dispossest,

With fading beauty and 'minished powers,

A tender torment, a priceless pain,

A very passion of fond unrest;

Such is the loss and such the gain,

Of the woman whom love has crowned and blessed.

Behold the wife constrained to part

Her life in twain, in legal bands

Idly eating her busy heart,

Vainly wringing her empty hands,

Wearing out in prayer the knees

That should have been her children's lap,

Spoiled of all but her silken ease,

A moaning creature in a trap,

Wishing that her's had been the state

Of the mother who never knew married mate."1

1 "A Rhyme for the Time." By Emily Pfeiffer. Contemporary Review, June

But the portion of "the mother who never knew married mate," is also, under English law, unjust and cruel, since, as I wrote in 1884:

"It would seem needless to insist upon the elementary fact that every human child must have two parents, that there can be no father without a mother, no mother without a father; if this were not just one of those primitive truths which the law as it stands at present seems expressly framed to ignore or to disguise. The law of this and of most other countries contravenes common-sense, humanity, and justice, by dealing with every child as the offspring of one parent solely. Upon the mother of a child born out of marriage it imposes duties, liabilities, and penalties, whilst it concedes to her only the most shadowy of rights, the father of such a child being a person unknown to the law, except when the action of the mother, or of the guardians of the ratepayers' pockets, has compelled him to contribute some slight share towards the cost of the maintenance of the child; other legal duties and responsibilities he has none, but neither has he any legal rights."

In France even this slight responsibility of the "unmarried father" is not enforced by law, all inquiry into the "paternity being, in such cases, strictly forbidden.

In the United Kingdom since 1886 the married mother can no longer be deprived, by the appointment of her husband, of the guardianship of her children after his death, but become sole guardian when no other guardian has been appointed by the father, and joint guardian should he have made any such appointment. The father of children born in marriage is the sole parent, so far, that is, as legal rights extend; their mother, as such, has no legal rights, though the law imposes upon her, "under criminal and other penalties," liabilities and duties almost equal to those of the father.

The gross wrong to the child of such legal recognition of one parent only seems quite beyond the conception of our masculine law-makers and law-interpreters, a painful evidence in itself of the still morally undeveloped condition of the male human animal, so seldom altruistic enough fully to realise that the human child needs the free, loving care of both parents. So long as this evil teaching of the law continues, we need wonder little at the mournful display of human selfishness in other directions, or that the maternal function, the crown and glory of womanhood, should be made the excuse for male despotism over the whole female sex, a despotism maintained, as M. de Morsier powerfully shows, by unjust law, evil social customs, and a base double code of sexual morality.

In her article L'Indépendance économique de la Femme au XX. Siècle, Mrs. Montefiore deals with another aspect of the same question, showing, as did Mrs. Stetson in her epoch-making book, Women and Economics, how the servile condition of woman is maintained and prolonged by her economic dependence upon man. Not that woman does not contribute as much as, or even more than, man, to all that makes for human well-being, but that both by law VOL. 160.-No. 1.

F

and custom she is robbed of her just reward, and forced into the .seeming position, and sometimes also into the actuality, of a mischievous " parasite.' The forcible exclusion of married women from paid employments, and their compulsory seclusion in the home," as urged by many would-be philanthropists, mean simply a falling back to the worst degradation of the past, by the enslavement of woman and the brutalisation of man. It is not without significance that the claim for the exclusion of married women from paid industry was never raised till after the Married Women's Property Act of 1870 gave to a wife the legal right to her earnings, earned apart from her husband. So long as the husband could legally appropriate the wife's earnings, receive them himself from her employer, or take them from her, withdraw her deposits from the savings bank, and spend them as he liked, nothing was heard of the cry "A working wife makes a lazy husband," though it was far more true then than it is now, for many men in those evil days deliberately calculated on living upon the proceeds of the toil of wife and children. Since then the cry has been pretty constantly raised, and is now tending towards the larger demand for the discouragement of female employment in all paid industries. Has it ever occurred to those who raise this cry, that the unpaid labour of wives, mothers, and daughters in the home is one main factor in creating the general disrespect for women's labour? The domestic labour in the home of the wife and mother may be, and humanly considered is, of the highest possible economic value, but it has no recognised monetary value. The hardest working wife and mother, because she receives no wages for that work, is, under our irrational system, classified industrially as an "unoccupied person," just as if she were an infant, or an idle "parasitic" man or woman. Men are, to borrow the phrase of a valued friend of mine, "economically dependent upon women," and their debtors for all this unpaid labour. But this economic dependence has a further result. The women who do so much unpaid work are frequently suddenly called upon to earn money, and take into the "labour market" the low estimate formed in the home of the money-value of their labour. They accept lower wages than men because of this false estimate, and because also their necessities are usually greater than those of men ; and thus become "the involuntary blacklegs of the labour-market.' In the result, this affects the wage-value of the labour of wageearning women as a class, and ultimately of the labour of men also. And then men get angry, and talk of "the invasion of the various fields of industry by women," as if women had not been working all the time, and quite as hard, to say the least, as any class of men.

"

Not by such enslavement of woman is the moral progress of man to be assured, and without that moral progress of what value is any material gain? Under such conditions, were any such gain possible,

it could only subserve the money-power and increase the insensate lnxury of the few, whilst reducing the multitude, men as well as women, to a still lower condition of servitude and slavery. Only by justice to woman can man uplift himself:

"The Woman's cause is Man's: they rise or sink
Together, dwarf'd or godlike, bond or free,"

Mrs. Montefiore argues that the women of the twentieth century must, in order to secure their own freedom and that of the race, insist on the necessity for themselves of professional and technical instruction equal to that given to men, must organise themselves for the amelioration of the conditions of their work, and, finally, must provide against the exigencies of childbirth by means of a "maternal insurance," in which each should share in proportion to the amount of her contributions. I must confess that to me this last suggestion appears more of the nature of a temporary and somewhat doubtful palliative than of a remedy, because it seems to ignore the fact that the father, as well as the mother, is responsible for the existence of the child, and therefore also owes to it parental duty. I see no reason whatever, except the carelessness of a male Parliament as to matters affecting women, why in England women who, under our Factory Acts, are by law excluded from the factory for one month after childbirth, should not receive, when necessitous, and without incurring the degradation of pauperism, help from the State, adequate to the cost of maintenance of the mother and child during the period of enforced seclusion, as is already the case in Denmark.

I, however, would rather urge women to work, by every means in their power, to secure forthwith that just equality of man and woman in civic right, and before the law, which is the first and absolutely essential condition of the growth of that higher humanity, those worthier social conditions, and that happier, truer, nobler human life which poets and thinkers have foretold; for which many brave souls have lived and worked; and for which women must continue to live and work, till justice between the sexes shall have put an end to the present cruel strife, and given at last to earth

"The single pure and perfect animal,

The two-cell'd heart, beating with one full stroke,

1

Life."

IGNOTA.

HOW DID CALDERON KNOW SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS?

Mr. G. G. Greenwood's able paper on "The Mystery of William Shakespeare," in your Review for December 1902, has brought very vividly before my mind a point which, strange as it may appear, I have never yet seen raised in the Baconian controversy, but which yet has, I think, some bearing on the question of the authorship of the Shakespearian plays. How did the great Spanish dramatist, Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca, become acquainted with Shakespeare's plays at a date certainly earlier than 1630 ? So far as we know he had, according to his best biographers, no knowledge of English, and yet there is a great resemblance between his Devocion de la Cruz, written in 1619, when the dramatist was only nineteen years of age and a student at the University of Alcala, and Romeo and Juliet. This likeness cannot be accounted for by the Italian "Novelle" or Bandello. Various writers have traced out the very great similarity which exists between Othello and Calderon's El Medico de su Honra, written before 1630, whilst anyone who has studied La Cisma de Inglaterra, which deals with the story of Anne Boleyn, must rise from the perusal of the work fully convinced that its author must have seen Shakespeare's Henry VIII. and the chronicles which Shakespeare used.

We know how closely Spanish literature was studied by Englishmen in the days of Elizabeth and of James I., but we are rather surprised to find English literature studied at the same period by Spaniards, yet, to quote only one instance, Cervantes, in his La Española Inglesa, shows a very fair acquaintance with English life and habits, There were, of course, English friars at Salamanca and at Valladolid, who trained most of the clergy of the English mission, whilst, at Madrid, a large body of English and Catholic exiles, such as the Arthur Dudley, who had claimed to be a son of Elizabeth by Leicester, and several of the O'Neils, who had long frequented Elizabeth's Court, gathered during forty years at the palace of that Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, who had been a lady-in-waiting of Queen Mary, and who survived, as an honoured guest of the Spanish kings, far into the reign of our James I. Were any of these cultured refugees, who before their exile had known Spenser and Southampton, Pembroke and Sir Walter Raleigh, acquainted with Shakespeare's