roven
that the husband, indebted though he was to his wife for the beginning
of his vast fortune, incarcerated her while sane in a lunatic asylum,
because she objected to his practical polygamy by his introduction of
a mistress into the family.

Political despotism has now its strongest hold in the theory of
woman's created subordination. Woman has been legislated for as a
class, and not as a human being upon a basis of equality with man, but
as an inferior to whom a different code was applicable.

Our recent Secretary of State, William M. Evarts, when counsel in the
Beecher-Tilton trial, defined woman's legal and theological position
as that of subordination to man, declaring that notwithstanding
changing customs and the amenities of modern life, women were not
free, but were held in the hollow of man's hand, to be crushed at his
will.

Then Mr. Evarts read from various legal authorities instances and
opinions bearing upon the subjugation of weak wives by strong
husbands, the gist of them being that confessions of guilt
obtained by such husbands from such wives are not entitled to
great weight. He continued:

RECOGNIZING THE PRINCIPLES OF MARRIAGE.

This institution of marriage, framed in our nature, built up in
our civilization, studied, contemplated, understood by the
jurisprudence of ages, is a solid and real institution, and for
its great benefits, and as a necessary part of them, it carries
not only the fact of the wife's subordination to the husband, but
of the merciful interpretation of that subordination[219] which
sensible, instructed men ever accord in practical life, and which
the judges pronounce from the bench, and the juries confirm by
their verdicts. Now, gentlemen, you may think that is our
advanced civilization, when so much of independence is assumed
for women, and such entire equality is accorded to them in
feeling and in sentiment by their husbands and by the world, that
the old rule of the common law interpreting this institution of
marriage, by which a wife was never held responsible to the law,
or subject to punishment for any crime committed in the presence
or under the influence of her husband, was one of those traits of
human nature belonging to ruder ages and to past times; but,
gentlemen, in our own Court of Appeals, and in the highest
tribunals of