ly, every other judge would, in like
circumstances, have erred. At the hazard of being called, for the ten
thousandth time, a visionary and a fanatic for holding opinions which,
though they will be entirely welcome to the more enlightened future
sense of men, are as entirely repugnant to their present sense, I
venture to say that the Judge erred in allowing himself to look into
the Constitution. Indeed, yours was a case that neither called for nor
permitted the opening of any law-book whatever. You have not forgotten
how frequently, in the days of slavery, the Constitution was quoted in
behalf of the abomination. As if that paper had been drawn up and
agreed upon by both the blacks and the whites, instead of the whites
only; and as if slavery protected the rights of the slave instead of
annihilating them. I thank God that I was withheld from the great
folly and great sin of acknowledging a law for slavery--a law for any
piracy--least of all for the superlative piracy. Nor have you
forgotten how incessantly, in the late war, our enemies, Northern as
well as Southern, were calling for this observance of the
Constitution. As if the purpose of that paper was to serve those
whose parricidal hands were at the throat of our Nation. I recall but
one instance in which I was ever reconciled to profanity. It was when,
during the war, I was witnessing a heated conversation between a
patriotic Republican and a rabid secession Democrat. The Republican
was arguing that the Government should put forth all its powers to
suppress the rebellion. At this stage the Democrat thrust in the
stereotyped rebel phrase: "but only according to the Constitution."
This interruption provoked the Republican to exclaim, as he hurried
on, "Damn the Constitution!" The oath so happily helped to express my
own feeling that I had no more heart to censure it than the recording
angel had to preserve the record of Uncle Toby's famous oath.

And now, in your case, is another wrongful use of the Constitution.
The instrument is cited against woman, as if she had united with man
in making it, and was, therefore, morally bound by the flagrant
usurpation, and legally concluded by it. Moreover, an excuse for
turning the Constitution against her is that doing so deprives her of
nothing but the pastime of dropping in a box a little piece of paper.
Nevertheless, this dropping, inasmuch as it expresses her choice of
the guardians of her person and property, is her great n