is imperiled, while women are in open revolt, or silently, patiently biding their time—such phenomena indicate deep-seated disease, whose infection spreads to every member of the body politic. Those who would send the fugitives back, tighten the laws and double the guards, are little aware of what a moral earthquake they are reading the riot act to. The old notion that slavery was the corner-stone of the republic was not more absurd and monstrous than the idea that woman's legal suppression is the corner-stone of the family. The question is not whether reform will disturb existing relations, but whether any system should continue if that system invades essential right and public interest. The simple fact that she was not consulted in framing the marriage contract, to which from the origin of society she has been forced to submit, alone justifies the woman's rights agitation; for all admit that contracts are morally binding only when parties thereto have a free voice in determining their conditions. This institution, for whose safety male keepers are so alarmed, now stands on usurped irresponsible power, and until reconstructed on the basis of equality and justice, rebellion against it is a duty. Brigham Young, who assumes woman's natural servility as a justification of his concubined system, is consistent—giving her the ballot there is only a trick to divert attention from the settled policy to crush out all dissent by orthodox violence—but monogamist objectors seem unaware that she must go back to polygamy, or forward to liberty. One cannot always remain suspended between something and nothing. To say the wife "belongs" to the husband, or the husband to the wife, implies ownership and calls for the deed of purchase. In denying her equality he herds her with brutes; claims himself to be a freeman, but insists that she shall live under rule codes of the dark ages. He lives in the nineteenth century, she in the ninth, and he puts a thousand years between himself and his lady-love in disfranchising her. We do not make love by statute and cannot unmake it that way. The law of cohesion between souls is as natural and inevitable as between atoms and globes. The fascinating intelligence at whose feet, in his truest moment, the male lover days all; the qualities of devotion, fortitude, self-sacrifice all bow to, in the gravest epochs of life—at the altar, the cradle and the tomb—will assert a regulating control if allowed free play. The true nuptial knot is in the heart, not on the house-top. In drawing-room or convention, nursery or senate, sewing circle or market-place, it matters little where thought ranges if light spreads and souls are born again.
Advent of agreement.What is apparent in the outer, material phases of life man inhabits, is so much more deeply true of its inner, spiritual realms, native to woman, that her emancipation will prove, not a source of discord, but the beginning of agreement. Had the wits of sham conservatives aimed at extreme badness, they could not have invented a scheme more fruitful, in conflict and immorality, than the present regime. The gave apprehensions of stately editors and divines, who think it unsafe to break every yoke, and obey God rather than men, like the anxiety of slave masters for the results of negro liberty, would be more note-worthy if they had the merit of disinterested intelligence. So far are we from ignoring the potential force of the sexual passions, or undervaluing the claims of maternity and offspring, that the originators of the woman's rights reform were the first to give those themes serious and intelligent consideration. Since this question touches the quick of life, goes to the foundations of order and being; precisely because its subject is woman, not a weak man, because the tragedy of motherhood is fraught with momentous interests to herself and the race, must she have free right to live and move independent of finite dictation. The maternal instincts is impaired by the very method now frantically clung to. Statistics prove that fæticide is not generally induced by pressure on the means of subsistence, but rather originates in causes attendant on dainty care-taking and luxury. Domestic animals often kid and devour their young; petted hens while sitting chip and eat their eggs. Child-murder is comparatively rare in poor countries like Ireland and among laboring people of all nations; while in Paris and New York, by the "upper" classes, it is increasingly practiced; mothers often provoking abor-
