these
resolutions upon the journal of this Convention. (Applause). I
would move to lay them on the table; but my conviction that they
are out of order is so emphatic, that I wish to go further than
that, and move that they do not appear on the journals of this
Convention. If the resolutions were merely the expressions of
individual sentiments, then they ought not to appear in the form
of resolutions, but as speeches, because a resolution has a
certain emphasis and authority. It is assumed to give the voice
of an assembly, and is not taken as an individual expression,
which a speech is.

Of course, every person must be interested in the question of
marriage, and the branch that grows out of it, the question of
divorce; and no one could deny, who has listened for an hour,
that we have been favored with an exceedingly able discussion of
those questions. But here we have nothing to do with them, any
more than with the question of intemperance, or Kansas, in my
opinion. This Convention is no Marriage Convention--if it were,
the subject would be in order; but this Convention, if I
understand it, assembles to discuss the laws that rest unequally
upon women, not those that rest equally upon men and women. It is
the laws that make distinctions between the sexes. Now, whether a
man and a woman are married for a year or a life is a question
which affects the man just as much as the woman. At the end of a
month, the man is without a wife exactly as much as the woman is
without a husband. The question whether, having entered into a
contract, you shall be bound to an unworthy partner, affects the
man as much as the woman. Certainly, there are cases where men
are bound to women carcasses as well as where women are bound to
men carcasses. (Laughter and applause). We have nothing to do
with a question which affects both sexes equally. Therefore, it
seems to me we have nothing to do with the theory of marriage,
which is the basis, as Mrs. Rose has very clearly shown, of
divorce. One question grows out of the other; and therefore the
question of the permanence of marriage, and the laws relating to
marriage, in the essential meaning of that word, are not for our
consideration. Of course I know, as everybody else does, that the
results of marriage, in the pr