ce, and which would long
since have filled our Insane Asylums to overflowing, were it not
for the unceasing drudgery to which we are subjected, in order to
save ourselves and families from starvation.

Often does the drunkard bestow upon his wife from one to a dozen
children to rear and support until old enough to render her a
little assistance, when they are compelled to seek service in
order to clothe themselves decently, and often are their
earnings, with those of their mother, appropriated to pay for
rum, tobacco, gambling, and other vices. "Say not that we
exaggerate these evils; neither tongue nor pen can do it!" says
the unfortunate wife of a man whose moral character, so far as
she knew, was unimpeachable, but who proved to be an insufferable
tyrant, depriving her of the necessaries of life, and often
ordering her out of the house which her friends provided for them
to live in, using the most abusive epithets which ingenuity, or
the want of it, could suggest. Intemperance degraded the
character of the man with whom she lived as long as apprehensions
for the safety of her life would warrant; from the fact that her
health was rapidly failing under the severity and deprivation to
which she was subjected, and the repeated threats of violence to
her own life and that of her friends. "But one step farther and
you drive us to desperation! Sooner would I pour out my heart's
blood, drop by drop, than suffer again what I have hitherto
experienced, or that my female friends should suffer as I have
done, and I know that many of them do. Yet, neither sacrifice,
sympathy, argument, or influence can avail us anything under
existing circumstances."

Such an appeal from helpless, down-trodden humanity, though it
were made to a council of the most benighted North American
savages, would not pass unheeded. Shall it be made in vain to
you?

To many of us death would be a luxury compared to what we suffer
in consequence of the abusive treatment we receive from
unprincipled men, which existing laws sanction and encourage by
their indiscriminate severity, and with which we are told "it
would be difficult to meddle on account of their sacredness and
sublimity." The idea is sufficiently ludicrous to excite the
risibility of the most grave. Though