owing to several very aggravated cases among leading families,
both in this country and England. The very liberal bill pending
in the Legislature had drawn special attention to it in the Empire State, which not only made the whole question of marriage and
divorce a topic of conversation at every fireside, but of many editorial
debates in our leading journals. Among others, Horace Greeley, in
The New York Tribune, had a prolonged discussion with the
Hon. Robert Dale Owen,[1] in which it was generally thought that
the weight of argument rested with Mr. Owen; but it was evident
that Mr. Greeley did not think so, as he afterward republished the
whole controversy at his own expense. The Albany Evening Journal also took strong grounds against the bill. But the opponents invariably discussed the question on the basis that marriage was an
equal relation, in which man suffered as much as woman, ignoring
the fact that man had made the laws governing it, and all to his own advantage.
From the following letter of Lucretia Mott, we see how clear she was as to the merits of the position we had taken in the discussion of this vital question:
Roadside, near Philadelphia, 4th Mo., 30th, '61.
My Dear Lydia Mott:—I have wished ever since parting with thee and our other dear friends in Albany to send thee a line, and have only waited in the hope of contributing a little "substantial aid" toward your neat and valuable "depository." The twenty dollars enclosed is from our Female Anti-Slavery Society.
I see the annual meeting in New York is not to be held this spring. Sister Martha is here, and was expecting to attend both anniversaries. But we now think the Woman's Rights meeting had better not be attempted, and she has written Elizabeth C. Stanton to this effect.
I was well satisfied with being at the Albany meeting. I have since met with the following from a speech of Lord Brougham's, which pleased me, as being as radical as mine in your stately Hall of Representatives:
"Before woman can have any justice by the laws of England, there must be a total reconstruction of the whole system; for any attempt to amend it would prove useless. The great charter, in establishing the supremacy of law over prerogative, provides only for justice between man and man; for woman nothing is left but common-law, accumulations and modifications of original Gothic and Roman heathenism, which no amount of filtration through ecclesiastical courts could change into Christian laws. They are declared unworthy a Christian people by great jurists; still they remain unchanged."
So Elizabeth Stanton will see that I have authority for going to the root of the evil.
We had a delightful golden-wedding on the 10th inst. All our children and
- ↑ Published at the close of Mr. Greeley's "Recollections of a Busy Life."
