age equally eloquent and impressive.

Mr. BURNETT: I hope the House will not act at all on this subject
without due consideration. I hope before even this motion is put,
gentlemen will be allowed to reflect upon the important question
whether these individuals deserve any consideration at the hands
of the Legislature. Whatever may be their pretensions or their
sincerity, they do not appear to be satisfied with having unsexed
themselves, but they desire to unsex every female in the land,
and to set the whole community ablaze with unhallowed fire. I
trust, sir, the House may deliberate before we suffer them to
cast this firebrand into our midst. (Here was heard a "hiss" from
some part of the chamber). True, as yet, there is nothing
officially before us, but it is well known that the object of
these unsexed women is to overthrow the most sacred of our
institutions, to set at defiance the Divine law which declares
man and wife to be one, and establish on its ruins what will be
in fact and in principle but a species of legalized adultery.
That this is their real object, however they may attempt to
disguise it, is well known to every one who has looked, not
perhaps at the intentions of all who take part in it, but at the
practical and inevitable result of the movement.

It is, therefore, a matter of duty, a duty to ourselves, to our
consciences, to our constituents, and to God, who is the source
of all law and of all obligations, to reflect long and
deliberatively before we shall even seem to countenance a
movement so unholy as this. The Spartan mothers asked no such
immunities as are asked for by these women. The Roman mothers
were content to occupy their legitimate spheres; and our own
mothers, who possessed more than Spartan or Roman virtue, asked
for no repudiation of the duties, obligations, or sacred
relations of the marital rite.

Are we, sir, to give the least countenance to claims so
preposterous, disgraceful, and criminal as are embodied in this
address? Are we to put the stamp of truth upon the libel here set
forth, that men and women, in the matrimonial relation, are to be
equal? We know that God created man as the representative of the
race; that after his creation, his Creator took from his side the
material for woman's creatio