ve her just
rights recognized and protected. A glance at the present position of
women will show that the law does not effect this. It places minors,
idiots, insane persons, and married women in the same category. Man
takes all that the wife has to his own use, and such robberies are so
common that they excite no indignation in the breasts of his
fellow-men. He can spend all she has at the gaming-table, and who can
hinder him? He can spend it in dissipation, while his deceived wife is
suffering at home for the necessaries of life. The law gives him the
property, and with that he can usually find tools to work out his
designs. The law interposes no barriers between him and his victim. If
a married woman had equal protection with her husband, she would be
ambitious to acquire property by her own industry, and the habit of
industry and forethought thus acquired, would be found valuable in
the marriage relation, and she would not be compelled to enter
matrimony as a house of refuge. But we are told that marriage is a
contract, voluntarily entered into by competent parties, and by this
contract the rights of the woman are transferred to the man. But
_marriage is not a contract_, it is an union instituted by God
Himself, anterior to any contract whatever. Man was not pronounced
good until woman was created, and God said, Let us make man in our
image after our own likeness, and let them _have dominion_. But some
one may meet us here with the question, did He not say to the woman,
after the fall, "Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule
over thee?" Yes, the Bible says so; and in the next chapter we are
told that Adam and Eve had two sons, the eldest called Cain, the
youngest Abel; and God said to Cain when speaking of Abel, "Unto thee
shall be his desire, and _thou shalt rule over him_." You see they are
the very words used to Eve; therefore, if dominion was taken from the
woman and given to the man, it was taken from all younger brothers and
given to the first-born. If marriage be a contract, why is it not
governed by the same rules that govern other contracts? A
consideration is necessary to the existence of a contract. In
marriage, the man offers love for love and hand for hand, but what is
the consideration for those personal rights of which he dispossesses
her? If a contract, why is there no remedy for its violation either in
law or equity, as is the case with other contracts? The bridegroom
says in the marria