e same. Well, now, suppose yourself a
woman. You are educated up to that point where one feels a deep
interest in the welfare of her country, and in all the great questions
of the day, in both Church and State; yet you have no voice in either.
Little men, with little brains, may pour forth their little sentiments
by the hour, in the forum and the sacred desk, but public sentiment
and the religion of our day teach us that silence is most becoming in
woman. So to solitude you betake yourself, and read for your
consolation the thoughts of dead men; but from the Bible down to
Mother Goose's Melodies, how much complacency, think you, you would
feel in your womanhood? The philosopher, the poet, and the saint, all
combine to make the name of woman synonymous with either fool or
devil. Every passion of the human soul, which in manhood becomes so
grand and glorious in its results, is fatal to womankind. Ambition
makes a Lady Macbeth; love, an Ophelia; none but those brainless
things, without will or passion, are ever permitted to come to a good
end. What measure of content could you draw from the literature of the
past?

Again, suppose yourself the wife of a confirmed drunkard. You behold
your earthly possessions all passing away; your heart is made
desolate; it has ceased to pulsate with either love, or hope, or joy.
Your house is sold over your head, and with it every article of
comfort and decency; your children gather round you, one by one, each
newcomer clothed in rags and crowned with shame; is it with gladness
you now welcome the embrace of that beastly husband, feel his fevered
breath upon your cheek, and inhale the disgusting odor of his tobacco
and rum? Would not your whole soul revolt from such an union? So do
the forty thousand drunkards' wives now in this State. They, too, are
all discontented, and but for the pressure of law and gospel would
speedily sunder all these unholy ties. Yes, sir, there are women, pure
and virtuous and noble as yourself, spending every day of all the
years of their existence in the most intimate association with
infamous men, kept so by that monstrous and unnatural artifice,
baptized by the sacred name of marriage. I might take you through
many, many phases of woman's life, into those sacred relations of
which we speak not in our conventions, where woman feels her deepest
wrongs, where in blank despair she drags out days, and weeks, and
months, and years of silent agony. I might paint you