dren, trembling with fear, fly to the
corners and dark places of the house, to hide themselves from the
wrath of drunken, brutal fathers, but, forgetting their past
sufferings, rush out again at their mother's frantic screams,
"Help, oh help"? Behold the agonies of those young hearts, as
they see the only being on earth they love, dragged about the
room by the hair of the head, kicked and pounded, and left half
dead and bleeding on the floor! Call that sacred, where fathers
like these have the power and legal right to hand down their
natures to other beings, to curse other generations with such
moral deformity and death?

Men and brethren, look into your asylums for the blind, the deaf
and dumb, the idiot, the imbecile, the deformed, the insane; go
out into the by-lanes and dens of this vast metropolis, and
contemplate that reeking mass of depravity; pause before the
terrible revelations made by statistics, of the rapid increase of
all this moral and physical impotency, and learn how fearful a
thing it is to violate the immutable laws of the beneficent Ruler
of the universe; and there behold the terrible retributions of
your violence on woman! Learn how false and cruel are those
institutions, which, with a coarse materialism, set aside those
holy instincts of the woman to bear no children but those of
love! In the best condition of marriage, as we now have it, to
woman comes all the penalties and sacrifices. A man, in the full
tide of business or pleasure, can marry and not change his life
one iota; he can be husband, father, and everything beside; but
in marriage, woman gives up all. Home is her sphere, her realm.
Well, be it so. If here you will make us all-supreme, take to
yourselves the universe beside; explore the North Pole; and, in
your airy car, all space; in your Northern homes and cloud-capt
towers, go feast on walrus flesh and air, and lay you down to
sleep your six months' night away, and leave us to make these
laws that govern the inner sanctuary of our own homes, and
faithful satellites we will ever be to the dinner-pot, the
cradle, and the old arm-chair. (Applause).

Fathers, do you say, let your daughters pay a life-long penalty
for one unfortunate step? How could they, on the threshold of
life, full of joy and hope, bel