ten stripes?

All conveniences for writing are denied, no messenger to be had to carry
a letter to any relation or friend; and if this tyrannical inquisition,
joined with the reasonable reflections a woman of any common
understanding must necessarily make, be not sufficient to drive any soul
stark staring mad, though before they were never so much in their right
senses, I have no more to say.

When by this means a wicked husband has driven a poor creature mad, and
robbed an injured wife of her reason, for it is much easier to create
than to cure madness, then has the villain a handle for his roguery;
then, perhaps, he will admit her distressed relations to see her, when
it is too late to cure the madness he so artfully and barbarously has
procured.

But this is not all: sometimes more dismal effects attend this
inquisition, for death is but too often the cure of their madness and
end of their sorrows; some with ill usage, some with grief, and many
with both, are barbarously cut off in the prime of their years and
flower of their health, who otherwise might have been mothers of a
numerous issue, and survived many years. This is murder in the deepest
sense, and much more cruel than dagger or poison, because more
lingering; they die by piecemeal, and in all the agonies and terrors of
a distracted mind.

Nay, it is murder upon murder, for the issue that might have been begot
is to be accounted for to God and the public. Now, if this kind of
murder is connived at, we shall no doubt have enough, nay, too much of
it; for if a man is weary of his wife, has spent her fortune, and wants
another, it is but sending her to a madhouse and the business is done at
once.

How many have already been murdered after this manner is best known to
just Heaven, and those unjust husbands and their damned accomplices,
who, though now secure in their guilt, will one day find it is murder of
the blackest dye, has the least claim to mercy, and calls aloud for the
severest vengeance.

How many are yet to be sacrificed, unless a speedy stop be put to this
most accursed practice, I tremble to think; our legislature cannot take
this cause too soon in hand. This surely cannot be below their notice,
and it will be an easy matter at once to suppress all these pretended
madhouses. Indulge, gentle reader, for once the doting of an old man,
and give him leave to lay down his little system without arraigning him
of arrogance or ambition to be a lawgiv