n protesting against
the authority of the tribunal before which they were summoned to
appear. Charles the First refused to recognize the competency of
the tribunal which condemned him: For how, said he, can subjects
judge a king? The stern descendants of our Pilgrim Fathers
refused to answer for their crimes before an English Parliament.
For how, said they, can a king judge rebels? And shall woman here
consent to be tried by her liege lord, who has dubbed himself
law-maker, judge, juror, and sheriff too?--whose power, though
sanctioned by Church and State, has no foundation in justice and
equity, and is a bold assumption of our inalienable rights. In
England a Parliament-lord could challenge a jury where a knight
was not empanneled; an alien could demand a jury composed half of
his own countrymen; or, in some special cases, juries were even
constituted entirely of women. Having seen that man fails to do
justice to woman in her best estate, to the virtuous, the noble,
the true of our sex, should we trust to his tender mercies the
weak, the ignorant, the morally insane? It is not to be denied
that the interests of man and woman in the present undeveloped
state of the race, and under the existing social arrangements,
are and must be antagonistic. The nobleman can not make just laws
for the peasant; the slaveholder for the slave; neither can man
make and execute just laws for woman, because in each case, the
one in power fails to apply the immutable principles of right to
any grade but his own.

Shall an erring woman be dragged before a bar of grim-visaged
judges, lawyers, and jurors, there to be grossly questioned in
public on subjects which women scarce breathe in secret to one
another? Shall the most sacred relations of life be called up and
rudely scanned by men who, by their own admission, are so coarse
that women could not meet them even at the polls without
contamination? and yet shall she find there no woman's face or
voice to pity and defend? Shall the frenzied mother, who, to save
herself and child from exposure and disgrace, ended the life
that had but just begun, be dragged before such a tribunal to
answer for her crime? How can man enter into the feelings of that
mother? How can he judge of the agonies of soul that impelled her