of ignoble submission. Only last week, a lady who has just been
divorced from her husband said to me--"I used to be required to
go into the field and do the hardest laborer's work, when I was
not able to do it; and my husband would declare, that if I would
not thus labor, I should not be allowed to eat, and I was obliged
to submit." I say the fault was as much with the woman as with
the man; she should never have submitted.

Our trouble is not with marriage as a relation between two; it is
all individual. We have few men or women fit to be married. They
neither fully respect themselves and their own rights and duties,
nor yet those of another. They have no idea how noble, how
godlike is the relation which ought to exist between the husband
and wife.

Tell me, is marriage to be merely a contract--something entered
into for a time, and then broken again--or is the true marriage
permanent? One resolution read by Mrs. Stanton said that, as men
are incompetent to select partners in business, teachers for
their children, ministers of their religion, or makers,
adjudicators, or administrators of their laws, and as the same
weakness and blindness must attend in the selection of
matrimonial partners, the latter and most important contract
should no more be perpetual than either or all of the former. I
do not believe that, rightly understood, she quite holds to that
position herself. Marriage must be either permanent, or capable
of being any time dissolved. Which ground shall we take? I insist
that, from the nature of things, marriage must be as permanent
and indissoluble as the relation of parent and child. If so, let
us legislate toward the right. Though evils must sometimes
result, we are still to seek the highest law of the relation.

Self-devotion is always sublimely beautiful, but the law has no
right to require either a woman to be sacrificed to any man, or a
man to be sacrificed to any woman, or either to the good of
society; but if either chooses to devote himself to the good of
the other, no matter how low that other may have fallen, no
matter how degraded he may be, let the willing partner strive to
lift him up, not by going down and sitting side by side with
him--that is wrong--but by steadily trying to win him back to the
right: