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MARRIAGE AS A TRADE

conflicting with our own conclusions; and it was our reverence for the written word alone that prevented the open and outspoken judgment, "She was silly."

So two small persons, to whom sex was still a matter of garments, seriously troubled by their own inability to appreciate a virtue held up to them for reverence, with views as yet level and unwarped on the subject of justice, and still in complete ignorance of the "economic" law that the cost of sin, like the cost of taxation, is always shifted on to the shoulders of those least able to bear or to resent it.

The key to the curious and inferior position of woman with regard to breaches, voluntary or involuntary, of the moral law is to be found in this right of the strongest to avoid payment. It is a right that is recognized and openly acted upon in the world of business and of property, that has to be considered and taken into account by financiers and statesmen in the collection of revenue and the imposition of taxes. It is the general exercise of this right that makes the incidence of taxation a study for experts. Roughly its result is, the weakest pays. Tax the business