to such an outrage of maternal instincts? How can he weigh the
mountain of sorrow that crushed that mother's heart when she
wildly tossed her helpless babe into the cold waters of the
midnight sea? Where is he who by false vows thus blasted this
trusting woman? Had that helpless child no claims on his
protection? Ah, he is freely abroad in the dignity of manhood, in
the pulpit, on the bench, in the professor's chair. The
imprisonment of his victim and the death of his child, detract
not a tithe from his standing and complacency. His peers made the
law, and shall law-makers lay nets for those of their own rank?
Shall laws which come from the logical brain of man take
cognizance of violence done to the moral and affectional nature
which predominates, as is said, in woman?

Statesmen of New York, whose daughters, guarded by your
affection, and lapped amidst luxuries which your indulgence
spreads, care more for their nodding plumes and velvet trains
than for the statute laws by which their persons and properties
are held--who, blinded by custom and prejudice to the degraded
position which they and their sisters occupy in the civil scale,
haughtily claim that they already have all the rights they want,
how, think ye, you would feel to see a daughter summoned for such
a crime--and remember these daughters are but human--before such
a tribunal? Would it not, in that hour, be some consolation to
see that she was surrounded by the wise and virtuous of her own
sex; by those who had known the depth of a mother's love and the
misery of a lover's falsehood; to know that to these she could
make her confession, and from them receive her sentence? If so,
then listen to our just demands and make such a change in your
laws as will secure to every woman tried in your courts, an
impartial jury. At this moment among the hundreds of women who
are shut up in prisons in this State, not one has enjoyed that
most sacred of all rights--that right which you would die to
defend for yourselves--trial by a jury of one's peers.

2d. Look at the position of woman as wife. Your laws relating to
marriage--founded as they are on the old common law of England, a
compound of barbarous usages, but partially modified by
progressive civilization--are in open violation of our
e