groom took off his slipper and struck the bride on the neck
as she crossed his threshold, was unmistakable. As my black sergeant said,
when a white prisoner questioned his authority, and he pointed to the
_chevrons_ on his sleeve, "Dat mean guv'ment." All these forms mean simply
government also. The ceremony of the slipper has now no recognition, except
when people fling an old shoe after the bride, which is held by
antiquarians to be the same observance. But it is all preserved and
concentrated into a single word, when the bride promises to obey.

The deepest wretchedness that has ever been put into human language, or
that has exceeded it, has grown out of that pledge. There is no misery on
earth like that of a pure and refined woman who finds herself owned, body
and soul, by a drunken, licentious, brutal man. The very fact that she is
held to obedience by a spiritual tie makes it worse. Chattel slavery was
not so bad; for, though the master might pervert religion for his own
satisfaction, he could not impose upon the slave. Never yet did I see a
negro slave who thought it a duty to obey his master; and therefore there
was always some dream of release. But who has not heard of some delicate
and refined woman, one day of whose torture was equivalent to years of that
possible to an obtuse frame,--who had the door of escape ready at hand for
years, and yet died a lingering death rather than pass through it; and this
because she had promised to obey!

It is said of one of the most gifted women who ever trod American soil,--
she being of English birth,--that, before she obtained the divorce which
separated her from her profligate husband, she once went for counsel to the
wife of her pastor. She unrolled before her the long catalogue of merciless
outrages to which she had been subject, endangering finally her health, her
life, and that of her children born and to be born. When she turned at last
for advice to her confessor, with the agonized inquiry, "What is it my duty
to do?"--"Do?" said the stern adviser: "Lie down on the floor, and let your
husband trample on you if he will. That is a woman's duty."

The woman who gave this advice was not naturally inhuman nor heartless: she
had simply been trained in the school of obedience. The Jesuit doctrine,
that a priest should be as a corpse, _perinde ac cadaver_, in the hands of
a superior priest, is not worse. Woman has no right to delegate, nor man to
assume, a responsibility s