ieving all things to be as they
seemed on the surface, judge of the dark windings of the human
soul? How could they foresee that the young man, to-day so noble,
so generous, would in a few short years be transformed into a
cowardly, mean tyrant, or a foul-mouthed, bloated drunkard? What
father could rest at his home by night, knowing that his lovely
daughter was at the mercy of a strong man drunk with wine and
passion, and that, do what he might, he was backed up by law and
public sentiment? The best interests of the individual, the
family, the State, the nation, cry out against these legalized
marriages of force and endurance. There can be no heaven without
love, and nothing is sacred in the family and home, but just so
far as it is built up and anchored in love. Our newspapers teem
with startling accounts of husbands and wives having shot or
poisoned each other, or committed suicide, choosing death rather
than the indissoluble tie; and, still worse, the living death of
faithless wives and daughters, from the first families in this
State, dragged from the privacy of home into the public prints
and courts, with all the painful details of sad, false lives.
What say you to facts like these? Now, do you believe, men and
women, that all these wretched matches are made in heaven? that
all these sad, miserable people are bound together by God? I know
Horace Greeley has been most eloquent, for weeks past, on the
holy sacrament of ill-assorted marriages; but let us hope that
all wisdom does not live, and will not die with Horace Greeley. I
think, if he had been married to _The New York Herald_, instead
of the Republican party, he would have found out some Scriptural
arguments against life-long unions, where great incompatibility
of temper existed between the parties. (Laughter and applause).

Our law-makers have dug a pit, and the innocent have fallen into
it; and now will you coolly cover them over with statute laws,
_Tribunes_, and Weeds,[169] and tell them to stay there and pay
the life-long penalty of having fallen in? Nero was thought the
chief of tyrants, because he made laws and hung them up so high
that his subjects could not read them, and then punished them for
every act of disobedience. What better are our Republican
legislators? The mass o