the
result of any disagreement between the husband and the wife. It
was only the natural outgrowth of the whole policy of our laws as
regards the property rights of woman. Permit us to notice one
other case, which occurred in a neighboring State. Many similar
ones, no doubt, have occurred in our own, the law in both States
being the same.

A woman who had a fortune of fifty thousand dollars in "personal
property," married. All this, by the law, belonged absolutely to
the husband. In a year he died, leaving a will directing that the
widow should have the proceeds of a certain part of this money,
_so long as she remained unmarried_. If she married again, or at
her death, it was to go to his heirs.

How different in all these cases is the condition of the
husband upon the death of the wife. There in then no officious
intermeddling of the law in his domestic affairs. His house, sad
and desolate though it be, is still sacred and secure from the
foot of unbidden guests. There is no legal "settlement" to eat
up his estate. He is not told that "one equal third part" of all
his lands and tenements shall be set apart for his use during
his lifetime. "He has all, everything, even his wife's bridal
presents too are his. If the wife had lands in her own right, and
if they have ever had a living child, he has a life estate in the
whole of it, not a beggarly 'third part.'"

Such is the result of man's government of woman without her
consent. Such is the protection he affords her. She now asks
the means of protecting herself, by the same instrumentality
which man considers so essential to his freedom and security,
representation, political equality--THE RIGHT OF SUFFRAGE.
The removal of this constitutional restriction is of great
consequence, because it casts upon woman a stigma of inferiority,
of incompetency, of unworthiness of trust. It ranks her with
criminals and madmen and idiots. It is essential to her,
practically, as being the key to all her rights, which will open
to her the door of equality and justice.

Does any one believe that if woman had possessed an equal voice
in making our laws, we should have standing on our statute books,
for generations, laws so palpably unequal and unjust toward her?
The idea is preposterous.

If our sense of natural justice and our theory of government both
agree, that the being who is to suffer under laws shall first
personally assent to them, and that the being whose industry the
go