, much less defend
it, could not herself be true, could not be pure, or must be fearfully and
grossly ignorant.

You acquiesce, fair lady. You say it was horrible indeed, but, thank God!
it is past. Past? Is it so? Past, if you please, as to the law of slavery,
but as to the legal position of woman still a fearful reality. It is not
many years since a scene took place in a Boston court-room, before Chief
Justice Chapman, which was worse, in this respect, than that scene in St.
Louis, inasmuch as the mother was present when the child was taken away,
and the wrong was sanctioned by the highest judicial officer of the State.
Two little girls, who had been taken from their mother by their guardian,
their father being dead, had taken refuge with her against his wishes; and
he brought them into court under a writ of habeas corpus, and the court
awarded them to him as against their mother. "The little ones were very
much affected," says the "Boston Herald," "by the result of the decision
which separated them from their mother; and force was required to remove
them from the court-room. The distress of the mother was also very
evident."

There must have been some special reason, you say, for such a seeming
outrage: she was a bad woman. No: she was "a lady of the highest
respectability." No charge was made against her; but, being left a widow,
she had married again; and for that, and that only, so far as appears, the
court took from her the guardianship of her own children,--bone of her
bone, and flesh of her flesh, the children for whom she had borne the
deepest physical agony of womanhood,--and awarded them to somebody else.

You say, "But her second husband might have misused the children." Might?
So the guardian might, and that where they had no mother to protect them.
Had the father been left a widower, he might have made a half-dozen
successive marriages, have brought stepmother after stepmother to control
these children, and no court could have interfered. The father is
recognized before the law as the natural guardian of the children. The
mother, even though she be left a widow, is not. The consequence is a
series of outrages of which only a few scattered instances come before the
public; just as in slavery, out of a hundred little girls sold away from
their parents, only one case might ever be mentioned in any newspaper.

This case led to an alteration of the law in Massachusetts, but the same
thing might yet happen i