nlightened ideas of justice, and of the holiest feelings of our
nature. If you take the highest view of marriage, as a Divine
relation, which love alone can constitute and sanctify, then of
course human legislation can only recognize it. Men can neither
bind nor loose its ties, for that prerogative belongs to God
alone, who makes man and woman, and the laws of attraction by
which they are united. But if you regard marriage as a civil
contract, then let it be subject to the same laws which control
all other contracts. Do not make it a kind of half-human,
half-divine institution, which you may build up, but can not
regulate. Do not, by your special legislation for this one kind
of contract, involve yourselves in the grossest absurdities and
contradictions.

So long as by your laws no man can make a contract for a horse or
piece of land until he is twenty-one years of age, and by which
contract he is not bound if any deception has been practiced, or
if the party contracting has not fulfilled his part of the
agreement--so long as the parties in all mere civil contracts
retain their identity and all the power and independence they had
before contracting, with the full right to dissolve all
partnerships and contracts for any reason, at the will and option
of the parties themselves, upon what principle of civil
jurisprudence do you permit the boy of fourteen and the girl of
twelve, in violation of every natural law, to make a contract
more momentous in importance than any other, and then hold them
to it, come what may, the whole of their natural lives, in spite
of disappointment, deception, and misery? Then, too, the signing
of this contract is instant civil death to one of the parties.
The woman who but yesterday was sued on bended knee, who stood so
high in the scale of being as to make an agreement on equal terms
with a proud Saxon man, to-day has no civil existence, no social
freedom. The wife who inherits no property holds about the same
legal position that does the slave on the Southern plantation.
She can own nothing, sell nothing. She has no right even to the
wages she earns; her person, her time, her services are the
property of another. She can not testify, in many cases, against
her husband. She can get no redress for wrongs in her own nam