prospect of his own comfortable residence there unless she were out of the way, began to devise measures to rid himself of her. With the aid of a physician bearing the same reputation as himself, and one of his most intimate friends, she was committed for safe keeping, on the plea of insanity, to a lunatic asylum where, to the disgrace of all civilization be it said, any man under the sanction of the same law which entrusted to his sovereign care and protection the tender and helpless being he had chosen for his wife, might consign her with no other evidence than his own biassed testimony and that of his interested friends, whenever, to serve any base purpose of his own, he wished to rid himself of her presence. There none of her friends might be allowed to hold any intercourse with her, and inexorable as fate, the law closed every avenue of defence through which an impartial investigation of facts might produce a reaction in her favor, and she was doomed to suffer day after day, and year after year the most cruel indignities, the most refined torture that a perversion of the family institution into an engine of domestic tyranny could produce.
The holiest institution that God has ordained, one which immediately and remotely effects all the interests of society, it is impossible to trifle with or enter lightly into without incurring the most serious results to ourselves and to the community.
Viewing it in this light and perusing the annals of legislation, no wonder that the soul is sickened by such harrowing details of social life, both public and private, in the pages of history. As domestic virtue
