let her womanly modesty take its risk in face of the black looks of scandalised officials of Admiralty or War Office; and she managed to live down pretty completely the charge of unwomanliness. But the example is a valuable one to remember, for there you get the claim of convention to keep women from a great work of organisation and public service, although already, in the home, their abilities for that special service had been proved. And so, breaking with that convention of her day Florence Nightingale went to be the nursing mother of the British Army in the Crimea, and came home, the one conspicuously successful general of that weary and profitless campaign, shattered in health by her exertions, but of a reputation so raised above mistrust and calumny that through her personal prestige alone was established that organisation of nursing by trained women which we have in our hospitals to-day.
Take again the special and peculiar opposition which women had to face when they began to agitate against certain laws which particularly affected the lives of women and did cruel wrong to them even in their home relations. Read the life of Caroline Norton, for instance—a woman whose husband brought against her a public charge of infidelity, though privately admitting that she was innocent; and when, after that charge was proved to be baseless, she separated from her husband, refusing to live with him any more, then he, in consequence of
