age, woman asks nothing at
this hour but the elective franchise. It is only in marriage that
she must demand her rights to person, children, property, wages,
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. How can we discuss
all the laws and conditions of marriage, without perceiving its
essential essence, end, and aim? Now, whether the institution of
marriage be human or divine, whether regarded as indissoluble by
ecclesiastical courts, or dissoluble by civil courts, woman,
finding herself equally degraded in each and every phase of it,
always the victim of the institution, it is her right and her
duty to sift the relation and the compact through and through,
until she finds out the true cause of her false position. How can
we go before the Legislatures of our respective States, and
demand new laws, or no laws, on divorce, until we have some idea
of what the true relation is?

We decide the whole question of slavery by settling the sacred
rights of the individual. We assert that man can not hold
property in man, and reject the whole code of laws that conflicts
with the self-evident truth of that assertion.

Again I ask, is it possible to discuss all the laws of a
relation, and not touch the relation itself?

Yours respectfully,
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON.

HORACE GREELEY in _The New York Tribune_, May 14, 1860.

_One Thousand Persons Present, seven-eighths of them Women, and a
fair Proportion Young and Good-looking_.--Whether the Woman's
Rights Convention will finally succeed or not in enlarging the
sphere of woman, they have certainly been very successful in
enlarging that of their platform. Having introduced easy Divorce
as one of the reforms which the new order of things demands, we
can see no good reason why the platform should not be altogether
replanked. We respectfully suggest that with this change of
purpose there shall also be a change in name, and that hereafter
these meetings shall be called not by name of Woman, but in the
name of Wives Discontented. Hitherto we have supposed that the
aim of this movement related to wrongs which woman suffered as
woman, political and social inequalities, and disabilities with
which she was mightily burdened. A settlement of the m