release, and was compelled to introduce as a witness, the constable who had been employed to find the vagabond husband and obtain his signature. His testimony disclosed the facts that he found the husband in the forest in one of our north-eastern counties, engaged in making shingles, (presumably stealing timber from the public lands and converting it into the means of indulging his habits of drunkenness,) and only five dollars of the fifty mentioned in the release had in fact been paid. The Court held, was compelled to hold, that the party injured in view of the law, had received full compensation for the wrong—and the mother and daughters with no means of redress were left to starve. This was the act of the representative of the wife and daughters to whom we are referred, as a better protector of their rights than they themselves could be.

It may properly be added, that if the action had proceeded to judgment without interference from the husband, and such amount of damages had been recovered as a jury might have thought it proper to award, the money would have belonged to the husband, and the wife could not lawfully have touched a cent of it. Her attorney might, and doubtless would have paid it to her, but he could only have done so at the peril of being compelled to pay it again to the drunken husband if he had demanded it.

In another case, two ladies, mother and daughter, some time prior to 1860 came from an eastern county of New York to Rochester, where a habeas corpus was obtained for a child of the daughter, less than two years of age. It appeared on the return of the writ, that the mother of the child had been previously abandoned by her husband, who had gone to a western state to reside, and his wife had returned with the child to her mother's house, and had resided there after her desertion. The husband had recently returned from the west, had succeeded in getting the child into his custody, and was stopping over night with it in Rochester on the way to his western home. No misconduct on the part of the wife was pretended, and none on the part of the husband, excepting that he had gone to the west leaving his wife and child behind, no cause appearing, and had returned, and somewhat clandestinely obtained possession of the child. The Judge, following Blackstone's views of husband's rights, remanded the infant to the custody of the father. He thought the law required it, and perhaps it did; but if mothers had had a voice, either in making or in administering the law, I think the result would have been different. The distress of the mother on being thus separated from her child can be better imagined than described. The separation proved a final one, as in less than a year neither father nor mother had any child on earth to love or care for. Whether the loss to the little one of a mother's love and watchfulness had any effect upon the result, cannot, of course, be known.

The state of the law a short time since, in other respects, in regard to the rights of married women, shows what kind of security had been provided for them by their assumed representatives. Prior to 1848, all the personal property of every woman on marriage became the absolute property of the husband—the use of all her real estate became his during coverture, and on the birth of a living child, it became his during his life. He could squander it in dissipation or bestow it upon harlots, and the wife could not touch or interfere with it. Prior to 1860, the husband could by will take the custody of his infant children away from the surviving mother, and give it to whom he pleased—and he could in like manner dispose of the control of the children's property, after his death, during their minority, without the mother's consent.

In most of these respects the state of the law has undergone great changes within the last 25 years. The property, real and personal, which a woman possesses before marriage, and such as may be given to her during coverture, remains her own, and is free from the control of her husband.

If a married woman is slandered she can prosecute in her own name the slanderer, and recover to her own use damages for the injury.

The mother now has an equal claim with the father to the custody of their minor children, and in case of controversy on the subject, courts may award the custody to either in their discretion.

The husband cannot now by will effectually appoint a guardian for his infant children without the consent of the mother, if living.

These are certainly great ameliorations of the law; but how have they been produced? Mainly as the result of the exertions of a few heroic women, one of the foremost of whom is her who stands arraigned as a criminal before this Court to-day. For a thousand years the absurdities and cruelties to which I have alluded have been embedded in the common law, and in the statute books, and men have not touched them, and would not until the end of time, had they not been goaded to it by the persistent efforts of the noble women to whom I have alluded.

Much has been done, but much more remains to be done by women. If they had possessed the elective franchise, the reforms which have cost them a quarter of a century of labor would have been accomplished in a year. They are still subject to taxation upon their property, without any voice as to the levying or destination of the tax; and are still subject to laws made by men, which subject them to fine and imprisonment for the same acts which men do with honor and reward—and when brought to trial no woman is allowed a place on the bench or in the jury box, or a voice in her behalf at the bar. They are bound to suffer the penalty of such laws, made and administered solely by men, and to be silent under the infliction. Give them the ballot, and, although I do not suppose that any great revolution will be produced, or that all political evils will be removed, (I am not a believer in political panaceas,) but if I mistake not, valuable reforms will be introduced which are not now thought of. Schools, almshouses, hospitals, drinking saloons, and those worse dens which are destroying the morals and the constitutions of so many of the young of both sexes, will feel their influence to an extent now little dreamed of. At all events women will not be taxed without an opportunity to be heard, and will not be subject to fine and imprisonment by laws made exclusively by men for doing what it is lawful and honorable for men to do.

It may be said in answer to the argument in favor of female suffrage derived from the cases to which I have referred, that men, not individually, but collectively, are the natural and appropriate representatives of women, and that, notwithstanding cases of individual wrong, the rights of women are, on the whole, best protected by being left to their care. It must be observed, however, that the cases which I have stated, and which are only types of thousands like them, in their cruelty and injustice, are the result of ages of legislation by these assumed protectors of women. The wrongs were less in the men than in the laws which sustained them, and which contained nothing for the protection of the women.

But passing this view, let us look at the matter historically and on a broader field.

If Chinese women were allowed an equal share with men in shaping the laws of that great empire, would they subject their female children to torture with bandaged feet, through the whole period of childhood and growth, in order that they might be cripples for the residue of their lives?

If Hindoo women could have shaped the laws of India, would widows for ages have been burned on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands?

If Jewish women had had a voice in framing Jewish laws, would the husband, at his own pleasure, have been allowed to "write his wife a bill of divorcement and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house"?

Would women in Turkey or Persia have made it a heinous, if not capital, offence for a wife to be seen abroad with her