Public Morals will be the special Care of the "Senatus Matronum."
But laws relating to trade and finance will not be the only ones which the feminine will request from the masculine legislature. The laws now protecting the feminine personality are utterly inadequate, and it is a vital question no longer to be put off, as to how much further and how much longer men are to be permitted to corrupt women. Why, also, in the case of women offenders, are lawyers, judge, and jury all men? Is this for us to be "tried by our peers?" As for the abominations of our police courts, the mingled harshness and ribaldry with which the wretched victims of social crime are treated, the depraving house of correction, the deadening, brutalizing penitentiary,—all, in fact, which men have devised for the punishment of men, and have applied indiscriminately to women,—it may do very well for their sex, which I suppose they understand, but not for ours. What the proper theory is I do not pretend here to say; but remedies would be thought of and applied quickly enough, were the lost and degraded of their own sex brought before cultured and Christian women. This is, indeed, where they should be brought, and then, perhaps, these would wake up to a sense of their duties and responsibilities in regard to those, to a horror of that into which a woman can be transformed when all other women abandon her, and to a recantation of the universal yet guilty feminine excuse, "Am I my sister's keeper?"
