The relation of men and women as husbands and wives antedate all other relations of the sexes. And whenever this one relation comes into complete harmony with the immutable and eternal laws of right, all other relations of the sexes will adjust themselves accordingly. What then has been the status of the husband and wife in the past, what has been his estimate of woman, and what the status he has given her and the laws he has made for her government?

The early savage man, like the savage of to-day, knew few wants save those of food, shelter, and warmth, which move the lower animals. Brute force predominated, and the man was the master of the woman, who was completely subordinated to him in all matters. The sole pursuits of those days being hunting and fighting, the qualities then of highest value were muscular strength and physical courage, swiftness of foot and keenness of vision, and in these qualities women were indisputably inferior to men. So we find the men of the early time holding woman in such low estimate, that among all races and nations there were legends professing to account for the introduction of women into the world, that were as ridiculous as they were contemptible. All of them gave evidence of the fact that woman was regarded as immeasurably man’s inferior, — “the mother of all evil, the open doorway of hell,”

In the ancient Hindoo civilization the status of the husband was that of master; the status of the wife that of slave. For her husband bought her, and when he brought her home, put on her neck the little collar which was the badge of ownership, as you put a collar on the neck of your dog, on which your name is engraven, that you may reclaim him if he wanders or is stolen. He could at any time sell her, she was taken for debt, he could lend her, he could gamble her away, he made for her the laws, he affixed the penalties, he executed them, he was her jury, judge, and executioner. The Hindoo wife did not speak the same language as man, her master, but talked in the patois, or dialect of slaves. She cooked his food, stood behind and served him, first tasting of every article, that her husband might be sure she was not poisoning him, and making her meal of what he left, if he left anything.

The husband was enjoined by the law-makers of the time “to keep his wife in subjection both by day and by night, and on no account to allow her to be mistress of her own actions, as she would surely behave herself amiss, although she might have sprung from superior caste. For the badness of men is better than the goodness of women. Therefore a wife shall never go out of the house without her husband’s permission, nor laugh without drawing her veil before her face.”

For the wife a code of laws was framed, whose influence has extended to the present time. “A woman has no other god on earth than her husband. The most excellent of the good works she can perform is to gratify him with the strictest obedience and devotion.”

“Her husband may be crooked, old, infirm, offensive in his manners, choleric, dissipated, a sot, a gambler, a debauchee, reckless of his domestic affairs, restless as a demon, destitute of honor, deaf and blind; his crimes and infirmities may crush him; yet shall his wife regard him as her God, serve him in all things, detect no defect in him, nor cause him disquiet.”

In the ancient civilization of China there was nominally a little improvement, for the husband held his wife as a ward. And yet, to all intents and purposes, the relation between them was that of master and slave. The birth of a daughter was counted a disaster, and so wretched was the condition of Chinese wives that female infanticide prevailed to a great extent. The feet of Chinese women were compressed in youth to misshapen stumps, compelling them to hobble along slowly and very awkwardly, and the singular practice is cruelly continued to the present time. Some writers among the Chinese explain that this method was adopted centuries ago, as a safeguard against the intrigues of women, their rigorous seclusion from the eyes of men not availing to prevent them. No Chinese woman was allowed to leave the Celestial Empire, nor was a foreign woman permitted to pass the frontiers. A wife was not allowed to eat with her husband; she could not quit her apartments without permission, and if she entered a temple she was arrested and imprisoned till some one appeared to claim her Fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, or other male relatives were commanded to keep women at home, under penalty of severe punishment, which was duly administered when they put in an appearance for an imprisoned woman.

Next to abject and unconditional submission of women to men, industry was inculcated as the greatest female virtue, and the labors and fatigues of women were as severe as those of men. “Employment is the guardian of female innocence,” wrote one of the Chinese teachers; “do not allow women for a moment to be idle. Let them be the first dressed, and the last undressed, all the year round.”

“No indoor household work is repugnant to a modest and sensible woman. The shuttle and the needle are to be the sole occupations of her leisure; the neatness of her house shall be her pride; and it shall be her glory either to nurse the sick or prepare a repast. The pearls and precious stones, the silk and gold with which a woman bedecks herself, are a transparent varnish which renders her defects apparent.”

In the old Egyptian civilization there was an entirely different order of things. Egypt was the home of early civilization, science, law, and religion, and the ancient Egyptians have been objects of interest to the civilized world in all ages. Renowned for its discoveries in art and science, it was the world’s university, where Moses and Pythagoras, Herodotus and Plato, all philosophers and lawgivers, went to school. Menes, the founder of the Egyptian Empire, according to some chronologists, lived B.C. 9150. Others consider the reign of Menes as old as B.C. 3500. A surprisingly large number of inventions, hitherto supposed to be modern, were known to the ancient Egyptians. It is a wonder to-day because of its ancient grand and massive architecture, now in ruins, its colossal statuary, its mural paintings, its arts of design, and its knowledge of astronomy, geometry, chemistry, mining, anatomy, and the practice of medicine. Those who make archaeology a study, and who know Egypt through its prehistoric revelations, declare that there are few new things in our nineteenth century civilization. Egypt had anticipated many of its inventions and discoveries.

In this highly civilized and ancient empire, which had reached the height of its grandeur and was beginning to decay, when nations which we call ancient were in their infancy, the status of the husband was that of the wife, and the twain were the two halves of one whole. The Egyptian bridegroom married his bride, as the Christian bridegroom marries his to-day, with a gold ring. And as he placed it on her finger, he used the same language as is used in the Church of England marriage service at the present time, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow;” ­— language which means nothing whatever to-day, but which in ancient Egypt meant exactly what was said. The bride also endowed the groom with her property, and the husband and wife became joint and equal owners of their united estates, whether they were large or small. Clemens, one of the early Christian fathers, tells us that the custom of marrying with a ring was derived by the early Christians from the Egyptians.

The ancient Egyptians believed in several trinities of gods, supreme among which was the trinity of God the Father, Osiris, — God the Mother, Isis, — God the Son, Horus. The worship of Isis, the Mother, with her son Horus in her arms, was as popular a worship in Egypt in the days of the Roman Emperor Augustus, as is the worship of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus in Italy to-day. Juvenal says that “the painters of Rome almost lived by painting the goddess, Isis,” who was the Madonna of Egypt. No Egyptian house was considered properly furnished, on whose walls there did not hang a picture of the Egyptian Madonna, with her child in her arms.

Now it could not be possible in such a civilization, where the husband and wife were married on terms of equality, and decorated the walls of their home, almost universally, with the divinest and holiest picture of motherhood they could conceive, — it was not possible in such an age, for the husband to regard his wife as his slave, or for the father to treat the mother of his children with supercilious contempt, as his inferior. He must have had some spiritual comprehension of the relation of the man to the woman, and of the husband to the wife. But in modern Egypt all this is lost, and the status of the husband there is the same as elsewhere in the Orient — he is the master. When the phrase “Oriental degradation of woman is used, it expresses the very ne plus ultra of debasement. There is for women nothing lower or deeper.

Those who are familiar with the Koran will remember that Mohammed promises the Mohammedan wives of the faithful, admission to heaven, because of their marriage with Mohammedans. The Mohammedan and Mormon theologies are alike in this particular, for in Mormondom no unmarried woman can enter heaven. And when a Mormon maiden dies she is hurriedly married by some hocus pocus to some man, dead or living, that she may be whisked into heaven when her husband enters.

The most grimly Orthodox of the Mohammedan teachers in the East to-day declare that no women can enter heaven, as it is already peopled with most beautiful women who await the coming of the faithful. They emphasize the teaching of the Koran, that no dog, pig, woman, or other impure thing can enter a mosque, — that no drunkard, madman, decrepit person, or woman can call the hour of prayer. And the woman who should attempt to violate either of  these laws would pay the forfeit of her life.

The elevated table-land of Central Asia, now known as “the plateau of Iran,” appears to have been the early homestead of the human race. “It was at least,” says Samuel Johnson, a scholarly writer, “the ancestral abode of those races which have hitherto led the movement of civilization.” They called themselves the Aryas, or “noble people,” and from them have descended the principal modern races of the world, with the exception of Jews, Turks, Magyars, North American Indians, and some declining remnants of peoples. They had fixed habitations on their elevated plateau, kept herds, tilled the soil, were rich in cattle, wrought in metals, spun and wove, made musical instruments, calculated time by the movements of the heavenly bodies, and cultivated affectionate and respectful domestic relations.

As this table-land became densely peopled by the natural growth of the human family, migrations were necessary. Sometimes they were occasioned by changes in the level of the earth’s surface, which made their rivers waterless, and rendered life insupportable to themselves and their herds. An army may pass from the Pacific to the Atlantic, through Asia into Europe, without encountering any elevation of more than a few hundred feet. So avoiding the mountains that could not be scaled, and the rivers that could not be forded, great bodies of Oriental emigrants moved out from Central Asia, to the East and the South, but in yet larger numbers to the West, when they passed over into Europe. Here they settled on the first desirable territory, always finding men and women in possession, which gives a hint of the antiquity of the race. These they killed, enslaved, or incorporated among themselves, — sometimes carrying forward all three processes at the same time.

The successive waves of migration took different routes, one column going to the North, and the other to the South. The climate of Europe was not the same then as now, for geologists tell us that ” since the tertiary period, two-thirds of Europe have been lifted above the sea.”  The Alps have been upheaved from two thousand to three thousand feet, and the Appenines from one to two thousand feet. Those who went to the south of Europe took possession of what we call to-day Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor, and developed one kind of civilization. Those who went to the North took possession of Scandinavia, — Norway, Sweden, and Denmark,- and developed another civilization.

What was the status of husbands and wives in these civilizations? “The northern races gradually developed a love of freedom, a passion for liberty, the southern people gave themselves to culture and social organization. The northern races stood for the development of the individual soul; those who went to the south became devoted to philosophy, art, and law. The northern people had a high ideal of woman, recognizing her as their other half and their equal, and developing a civilization that in a semi-barbarous way gave prominence to this great truth, while the southern races simply indulged in romantic admiration of the beauty and graces of woman.”

The world will never be so wise, nor so old, as to regard with indifference the marvelous civilization of Greece. No nations, dead or living, have ever surpassed the Greeks in their development of art. When our students of art can learn no more of modern teachers, they cross the ocean, and study under the old Greek artists, through their masterpieces, scattered through the European galleries.  The exquisite language of the Greeks and their various phases of philosophy are studied to-day, and enter into the culture of the schools. They were the wisest, most intellectual, and wittiest people of their time.  But they retained the Oriental estimate of women, and were not good husbands.

They held woman in everlasting tutelage from the cradle to her gray-haired old age. No Greek wife could sit at table with her husband. No Greek bride could speak to her husband for months after her marriage, until he first spoke to her. No Greek wife could speak to a man without her husband’s permission, nor appear at the door, where the eyes of other men might behold her. There were instances where the wife rushed to the door to welcome her husband home from a victorious battle, and was stricken down by him, because the eyes of his subordinate officers had rested upon her. The rooms of Greek women were in the rear of the house, and were only reached through the apartments of the men. They were poorly furnished, and in marked contrast with those of men which were glorified by art, and fitted up for comfort. The woman’s kitchen was a rude portable furnace, or crude stove in the back yard, knee deep in dust in summer, and knee deep in mud in winter.

It was only possible to maintain this degradation of Greek women, by keeping them in ignorance, for they inherited the Greek intellect as well as their brothers and husbands. So the law, or a public opinion that had the force of law, denied education to Greek women. They could not talk correctly the beautiful language spoken by their husbands, nor read the literature they created. Their occupations were spinning, weaving, superintending their slaves, cultivating their own physical beauty, and that of their children. If a Greek woman was educated, she immediately lost caste, and was compelled to take her rank with the hetirae, or courtesans of the day. We need not ask the result, for there is no sacrifice that women will not make for their good name. And Greece, fertile above all other lands in great men, was remarkably barren of great women.

But all Greek women did not accept this order of things. There were women who spurned marriage, since it sank them more deeply in ignorance and servitude, and who demanded for their sex education and culture. They were “the strong-minded” women of their day, who boldly proclaimed their rights. “Call us by what odious names you please!” was their defiant challenge; “Calling us vile women does not make us so. We repudiate marriage; we will not receive Greek husbands, for marriage is slavery, and we will have freedom. We will have education; knowledge is our right!”

They availed themselves of their freedom to acquire a degree of knowledge that rendered them fascinating to the philosophers, poets, artists, and historians of their time. Cultivating personal beauty, and studying graces of manner and expression, they stepped into the social position that the ignorant Greek wives could never have filled, and became the center of a matchless literary society. Pindar sang their praises; Praxiteles cut their statues in marble, and carved them in ivory and gold; Apelles painted their portraits; even Socrates attended their assemblies, and learned all the rhetoric he ever knew of one of them. The great men of the day rallied around them, and Greece was dominated by a class of women unlike any other that has appeared in history. So unexampled was their elevation that legal marriage was brought into disrepute, and illicit connections were formed generally and openly. And when Greece died, it was not for lack of culture or knowledge, but because of moral rottenness.

Among the ancient Romans, husbands vested themselves with absolute power over their wives, as did the early Greeks. Monogamic marriage was strictly enforced, and when a man married, his wife became his property, he owned her, her earnings, her children, and her fortune. He became her priest, lawgiver, ruler, judge, jury, and executioner. At no time of her life was a wife independent. She passed from the control of her father to that of her husband, and when he died, a guardian was appointed for her.

The Roman husband possessed almost unlimited power of divorce from his wife. But it was the boast of the early Roman republic, which gave freedom to the few, and enslaved the overwhelming majority, that not one divorce was obtained in Rome, during the first five hundred and twenty years of its history, so great was the purity of the family life.

That women suffered from the tyranny of Roman husbands is evident from the fact that a temple was dedicated to the goddess Viriplaca, in the city of Rome, whose mission was to appease angry husbands, and Roman wives thronged her courts in supplication, and to worship her. Livy tells us that during the boasted Republic of Rome, a vast conspiracy was discovered among Roman wives, to poison their husbands, which certainly does not speak favorably of the love inspired by them. Pliny informs us that it was contrary to Roman law for women to drink wine, and that the penalty of the violated law was death. And we read of noble Roman men who scourged, and starved, and tortured to death the women whom they even suspected of tasting wine. Cato says that Roman men only kissed women to ascertain if they smelled of wine.

The closing years of the Roman Republic, and the dawn of the Roman Empire, were marked by great decline in morals. Rome had become the mistress of the world. The intoxication of wealth, acquired by universal conquest of the richest provinces of the Orient, the presence of vast multitudes of imported slaves who relieved the Romans of all labor, and an inundation of Eastern luxury, and Eastern of society, from the lowest to the highest. The extreme coarseness of the Roman disposition, and the unnatural passion of the people for cruelty, added to the utter loss of faith in the Roman religion, intensified the debasement of the age, and swept away all safeguards of honor, virtue, and character.

Women were overwhelmed by the demoralizing tide which flowed in upon Rome; it invaded domestic life, and broke down honorable marriage. When the great Augustus became Emperor of Rome, he strove against the laxity of morals which disinclined men and women to marry, and to form illicit relations. He imposed fines on bachelors who remained unmarried after they were twenty-five. But although the fines were increased with increasing years, if they remained celibate, it availed little, for women refused their proposals of marriage. They boasted of the marital compacts they had already formed, that had lasted for a year, a month, or a week, and gloried in the number of husbands they had accepted, and from whom they had divorced themselves at pleasure.  The last centuries of Rome were dominated by a brutal, hideous, ghastly promiscuity, glorified to-day in certain circles under the specious name of ” free love.” And Rome died!

History tells us that the Eternal City succumbed to the incursions of the Goths and Vandals, who swarmed from the North for hundreds of years, one generation following another, with slaughter, and pillage, and ruthless destruction. But not until the very heart of the Roman people was eaten out by luxury and beastly immorality, did the barbarians of the North prevail against them.

Among the Northern people of Europe there was another phase of civilization. The Romans called these Northmen “barbarians,” for they had no written literature, and knew nothing of art. We cannot fail to be interested in them, because, as Anglo-Saxons, we are their descendants. Most of our information concerning them comes from Tacitus, the Roman historian. They were republican in government, and elected their rulers in rude conventions of the people; were the authors of the system of trial by jury; were lovers of liberty, courageous, and strong-willed, and were purer in morals than the Greeks or Romans. They regarded women as semi-divine, and were content with one wife. When the old Scandinavian chief was asked concerning his religion, he said, “Ask our women, for they stand near to God, and what they tell us we believe, though we do not always live up to it.” An outrage upon a woman was punished with death, and if she violated the marital compact, she was chased by her own sex into the wilderness.

The women objected to the frequent feasts of the men, when they drank heavily of strong liquors and became grossly intoxicated. The regulation of the drinking was therefore placed in the hands of women, and men pledged themselves to regard their wishes. The use of intoxicating drinks was forbidden to ancient Scandinavian women. But they sat at the rear of the banqueting hall, and watched the progress of the feast. And when they rose, as a signal for the drinking to be discontinued, every man set his drinking horn on the table, even though it was lifted half way to his lips. Although war was the main business of their lives, these Northmen never made war without the consent of their women. Before attacking their enemies, they called a meeting of the women councilors appointed for this purpose, and laid before them the cause of the quarrel, and the advantages to be derived from war and conquest. The women were then left to debate the matter.

If they declared for peace, all hostile demonstrations ceased, and the warriors occupied themselves with peaceful pursuits. If they pronounced for war, fierce conflicts followed, in which women engaged equally with men. For the Northern women not only marched with the men in their migrations, and endured with them continual hardships and dangers, but they accompanied them in their warlike expeditions, and cared for the horses and chariots at the rear, while the men engaged the enemy in front. Not unfrequently, they were placed in line of battle behind the fighting men, as a reserve force. Tacitus tells us that women defeated the Roman legions under the great general Marius, not only once, but in five separate engagements. Not only did they drive back the Romans, but they utterly routed them, and turned the defeat sustained by the men into an overwhelming victory.

Although these experiences developed in the Northern women, to a high degree, the characteristics of courage, strength of will, endurance, and fortitude, they were admired and beloved by their husbands, who held them in high esteem, and seemingly placed them on a footing of equality with themselves. Plutarch, Tacitus, and Strabo, all Roman writers, and enemies of the Northern people, who were perpetually at war with Rome, made the Northern women the subject of eulogy, because of their beauty, chastity, pure morals, and wifely qualities. They were never degraded to the abject position of the early Greek and Roman women, but asserted their natural influence in family life, in which they were sustained by their husbands.

Almost coeval with the downfall of the Roman empire, and its moral and social disorganization, there came a decay of the polytheistic religions, and a decline of the Greek philosophy. The ancient religions of Greece and Rome passed away. The national legends became mere fictions, — the ancient miracles were seen to be only feats of legerdemain, ­— and philosophers and statesmen cast away the ancient gods, and only outwardly paid them respect. A philosophy was slowly substituted for the ancient religion, which threw some light on the problems of God, duty, and human destiny. But it gave way before Christianity, which announced the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, which condemned the low morality that prevailed, and demanded inner purity of thought and soul, to be shown in corresponding purity of life. It taught an unending life beyond the grave, it declared that all were equal before God, and swept away the unjust distinctions that had heretofore existed between bond and free, Jew and Greek, male and female.

The contrast between the Christian and Pagan view of the family was wonderful. The Pagan religions made the husband and father absolute ruler and owner of the wife and children, even when the latter had reached the adult age. Christianity put the husband and wife on a footing of equality. The writings of the Apostle Paul are often quoted, as teaching the subordination of the wife. But when carefully studied they teach no such thing, their purpose being the uplifting of the Greek ideal of marriage, which was exceedingly low. Paul does indeed command, “Wives obey your husbands in the Lord.” But he has also an injunction for husbands. “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it . . . that he might present it to himself a glorious church . . .  So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.” Eph. 5: 21-28.

All these instructions of Paul concerning marriage and family life were given to churches in Greece, never to those in Rome, or Judea. For the Greek husband was, as a rule, intellectual and educated, while the Greek wife was deplorably ignorant, as law and custom at that time required. This fact explains another oft-quoted direction of the Apostle. “1Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home.” 1 Cor. 14: 34, 35. This was not uttered as a principle,, but as a local and temporary precept. If Paul gave the direction as binding upon all women for all time, he laid down a law to which universal obedience is impossible. For in these days of woman’s higher education, many a husband is incompetent to teach his wife at home, for she has had a large training in the schools, and he, the narrower education in trade, commerce, and manufacture.

Paul was a great tactician, as well as a great apostle. He saw the low standard of marriage prevailing in Greece, where the husband was immeasurably the superior of the wife, and sought to uplift it, by inculcating patience, tender training, and mighty love to the husband, and acquiescence on the part of the wife. He was to be. her teacher, and to bridge over the distance between them by his affection, and ultimately to lift her to the level of his own development. She was not to bring the new religion into disrepute by her ignorant speech, for the men of her nation were the brightest and most cultivated in the world. She must “learn of her husband at home.”

Prepared for Christianity by their loss of faith in the ancient religion, the Greek and Latin races slowly accepted the, Christian faith, followed afterwards by the Goths and Vandals, Lombards and Franks, and then by the Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Every scholar will tell you, that the part of women in the formation or maintenance of moral or religious opinion among the Greeks or Romans was very small. But they did solid work in the early diffusion of Christianity Jesus himself manifested great regard for the faith in him, and the aid given him by women. The apostle John addressed his second letter, or “epistle ” to a woman convert, “the elect lady and her children.”  And Paul, writing a last letter before his death, remembers affectionately, and by name, the noble women who had worked with him, and incidentally reveals his great indebtedness to them. Men began to realize that women throbbed with the same high aims, and were instinct with the same life as  themselves; that whatever their claims as men, their wives and daughters had just the same. Most of the great teachers of the early church fully recognized the equality of woman with man, and the new religion silently advanced her to a real partnership with him, and also rendered him worthier such companionship. A new era had dawned for women.

For a time, it seemed as if Christianity, with all the gains it brought the race, would dominate the world. But reforms do not advance to complete fruition, without retrogression and halting step. The downfall of Rome destroyed all strong, central European government, and the phenomenal period, called “the dark ages”, set in. The world retrograded steadily, and seemed to forget what it had learned. Christianity remained the nominal religion of Europe, but so grossly perverted, and so wickedly misinterpreted, that a respectable paganism would have done it better service. And in the sixteenth century, wife-whipping had become so universal, that in many houses the stick hung over the door, with which the husband was expected to keep his wife in order.

The Welsh law declared “that a husband might whip his wife when she lied to him, cursed him, or disobeyed his commandment. But he must never give her but three blows at a time, and then must use a broomstick.” In Shakspeare’s play of “Taming the Shrew,” Petruchio’s treatment of Kate shows that the discipline of wives, at that time, included beating and other like heroic treatment. If men were wife-beaters, it cannot be denied that women were termagants. How could it be otherwise? Beaten by husbands according to law, without redress in the courts, and lacking the brawn and muscle to return their blows, with interest, there was left them only the use of the tongue. And many a wife-beating husband was routed by his sharp tongued wife, who, with woman’s keen instinct, knew his most vulnerable point, and pounced upon it with words that stung like hornets, until he was glad to beat a retreat.

But the law came to the husband’s relief in this case also. If the wife “scolded,” he could “toss her in a blanket,” “duck her in a horse-pond,” or compel her to wear “the scold’s bridle.” This was an ingenious headgear, somewhat resembling a dog’s muzzle, which closed the mouth, and pressed down the tongue with a long, stiff needle, which transfixed the offending member if the woman attempted to speak.

Proverbs are the legitimate outgrowth of the social life of a people, and express the general opinions of the time.

It is hardly possible to find a complimentary proverb, relating to women, in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I quote a few of them that you may understand the contempt With which women were generally regarded at that time:

The husband that hath a fair wife needs more than two eyes.

Women and dogs set men by the ears.

The husband that tells his wife news is but newly married.

Women, wind, and fortune are forever changing.

The husbands are in heaven whose wives scold not.

Every woman would rather be handsome than good.

A house full of daughters is a cellar full of sour beer.

Three daughters and their mother are four devils for the father.

A man of straw is worth a woman of gold.

A happy couple is a husband deaf and a wife blind.

He that loseth his wife and a sixpence on the same day, hath great sorrow for the loss of his sixpence.

If one woman hath one cow, and another hath two, marry her that hath two cows; for there never yet was a
cow’s difference between any two women.

There were husbands who carried their satirical contempt for their wives to the grave, as some of the old English churchyards testify. The following inscription was placed on his wife’s gravestone by a brutal husband:
 
Here lies, thank God! a woman, who
Quarreled and stormed her whole life through;
Tread gently o’er her mouldering form,
Or else you’ll raise another storm.

Another inscription overflows with glee over the grave of the departed wife

Here lies my wife, — here lies she!
Hallelujah! Hallelujee!

There is a story of a husband and wife who had lived in a very cat-and-dog fashion. The husband was the first to yield to death, and perceiving its approach, he ordered his gravestone, and had it inscribed with an epitaph of his own composition, not daring to leave it to his wife. After he was snugly tucked away underground, his wife took a stonecutter to the churchyard, and  completed it by the addition of a sentiment of her own. The inscription, thus amended, reads as follows:

Youthful reader, passing by,
What you are now so once was I;
As I am now So you must be;
Therefore prepare to follow me.
 
The wife’s addition suggested a little doubt as to her husband’s destination:

To follow you I’m not content,
Until I know which way you went.
 
She certainly had the last word in the controversy, which is said to be very dear to the heart of women.

To-day we do not live under the laws of feudalism, nor those of the Orient. And in our country, in this latter half of the nineteenth century, the notoriously bad husband receives as severe condemnation from men as from women. The old common law declared that the husband and wife were one, and that one the husband, but this legal fiction has given place to a nobler estimate of women. The tendency of legislation is to lift the wife to the plane of equality with the husband, so that they shall stand in law as two legal halves of one whole, neither being superior nor inferior, but each the complement of the other. And this is the outcome of a better comprehension of woman’s nature.

Woman has attributes of her own, as woman — as man has of his own, as man. If man is force, woman is attraction. If man is the head, woman is the heart. If man is logic, woman is intuition. If man is ambition, woman is aspiration. If man is wisdom, woman is love. If man is scientific, woman is artistic. If “man is inductive, seeing facts, woman is deductive, seeing truth.” Only through higher level than it has yet attained, both legally and morally. Laws are still retained on the statute books that are unjust, and harmful to married women and their children. As yet, only seven states of the Union make the father and mother equal legal owners and guardians of the minor children, — New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oregon. In all other states the father has the legal ownership and control of the minor children. It is easy to see what power over the mother this law gives to a husband, who may be tyrannical, drunken, or brutal.

The law which gives the husband sole power to choose the domicile. is sometimes so used as to make the life of the wife and children almost nomadic. So often are they compelled to change their residence by the fiat of the husband, that they cannot take root anywhere, and are homeless in their feeling. The laws that give the husband the ownership of the wife’s person and the control of her earnings, which still disgrace the statute books of many states, are responsible for much of the unrest and unhappiness of the marriage relation. While the laws that dispose of the estate of a husband and father, who dies intestate, are often unjust and cruel.

Rarely do men pay women the same wages when they do the same work, and the relations of the government are so arranged, that while women help to bear its burdens, its benefits are mostly conferred upon men. In some states there are severer penalties for crimes committed, when women are the criminals, and in all states save three, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah, women stand on a legal equality with men only when punishment and the payment  exist. “We are wont,” says Emerson, “to think that we are at the meridian of civilization. We are only at the cock-crowing and the morning star.” Neither men nor women have yet outgrown the low conditions of society, which obtained when the doctrine of male superiority was universally accepted.

One of the most serious and widespread evils of our time is the inebriety of men, alike in high life and low life, and in all classes of society. When these inebriate men are husbands, — as most of them are, —  it is impossible to frame a statement of the evil consequences, that will give an adequate idea of their magnitude and enormity. Fearful as are the visible results of inebriety, they only faintly indicate the evil wrought within. For the inebriate drowns his moral nature, extinguishes his reason, and brings himself to the level of the brute. He inflicts on his wife a life of torture, who passes through the extremes of fear and despair, and entails upon his children enfeebled constitutions and diseased appetites, which shadow and hamper them through life.

While visiting an art gallery, my attention was called to a work of art, remarkable alike for its admirable technique and its unmitigated repulsiveness. It represented, in marble, the figure of the drunken god, Silenus, astride an ass. The only sober object in the sculpture was the ass, bestrode by the marble god, whose every feature, muscle, and fibre drooped in senseless inebriety.  On the other side the gallery was an ivory satyr, with pointed face, short horns, leering eyes, and lolling tongue, the whole expression indicating beastly sensuality  And locked within a glass case, to protect it from the-handling of the curious, was the head of a Bacchante, one of the female worshipers of the boosy god, Bacchus. It was cut in the pellucid crystal of a gem, bluer than God’s heaven, the head was thrown back, the hair dishevelled, the eyes stared in terror, the face was distorted, and the mouth wide open, as if shrieking in drunken frenzy.

Let there be sufficient time, and these works of art will cease to be. The marble god, the ivory satyr, and the Bacchante will disintegrate into sand and dust. But the drunken father is also an artist. And he sends out into the world hideous caricatures of the living God, in the persons of his own children, who reel through life insane, imbecile, deformed, and depraved, when they should be men and women born in the image of the Heavenly Father. The woman who dares marry a libertine, or a drunkard, with the hope of reforming him, or the expectation of finding happiness with him, ought to have a chance in a lunatic asylum, or a home for imbeciles.

Before all forms of government, all types of civilization, all social institutions, and all advance in education, the relations of the husband and wife make the everlasting granite on which the whole world rests. Just so fast and just so far as these relations are what they ought to be, just so fast and just so far will society be uplifted, — no faster and no farther.   Monarchies, democracies, and republics have their benefits and their uplifting tendencies, but it is the family and the home that lay the foundations of country. All other influences are fitful and fragmentary The home influence alone is steady and sufficient, and that depends upon the relation of the husband and wife -the father and mother Unless there is on both sides first, respect, and then love with its all-embracing sympathy, the child’s head will be pillowed upon discord, it will be rocked by restlessness, and will develop unsymmetrical in character.

One of the great questions of the day is, “How shall we purify public life?” We can purify public life no faster than we purify private life in the home, for the public life is only the public expression of the private life of a people. The advance of a nation comes only through the improvement of the homes of a nation. As the aggregate of these may be, so will the nation be. The greatness of a nation is not made by its extensive territorial domain, nor by its vast wealth, nor yet by its impregnable fortifications, its battleships, and trained soldiery. It may possess all these material insignia of greatness, and yet be weak, and, like Rome, fall a prey to barbarian hordes. The greatness of a nation is made by its true men and women who have been well born, in good homes, where they have been fashioned into a lofty type of enduring manhood and womanhood.

I would make marriage what the Catholic church calls it, but does not make it, — a “sacrament.” A marriage which unites a man, presumably for life, with one who is his pronounced legal inferior, whom he is to control, and whose person, earnings, and children he legally owns, cannot be  made a “sacrament.” It is, instead, a form of slavery But shall not the husband be the head of the wife? Ay, he shall be, if he will. The true wife desires nothing more than that her husband shall be king in his own right, and by his own act, for then shall she be queen. But when instead of wearing, the royal purple of an incomparable manhood, he clothes himself in the rags, of a dissolute life, she too fails of the throne, and the sceptre drops from her hands. I would lift marriage from the level of the market, and from the domain of political economy. It does not belong there. It is not alone the cradle of the human race, but its crown. It he loved it more than any maiden of Greece, and he besought the gods, “Give me, for bride, a maiden symbolized by my beautiful statue.” And they answered, “When thou art worthy the gift, it shall be thine.” And this he sought to become, until one day as he prayed, he took the hands of his stone maiden within his own, when lo, the marvel! The veins throbbed with life, the face flushed with crimson, the eyes gazed fondly into his, the lips parted, and the silent maiden spoke. “I am thy bride, and thy holy and reverent affection has invoked life into the statue thine own hands have made.” It is but a graceful tale of the old Greek mythology But it has been a verity in the lives of hundreds of women, who, by the holy living and reverent love of noble husbands, have been lifted to a bliss, compared with which their former life was death.

I would have the husband take the wife to the marriage feast, as Aurelian took Zenobia to Rome, — a captive, to be sure, but a willing captive. She should not walk afar in the procession, as did Zenobia, with manacled hands, reluctant feet, and despairing eyes. But she should sit beside her conqueror, his beloved equal, and the banner floating over them should be that of love. When men shall seek women with the irresistible magnetism of pure affection, clad in the purity they expect women to wear, stainless in manhood and commanding in character, women will match them in nobleness of endeavor, and in high attainments, glorifying the marital union with a blessedness never yet more than half developed.

Then will “the statelier Eden come again to man.” Then shall the pillars of the home they build reach to Heaven. Then shall human fatherhood and human motherhood take on something of the tenderness, wisdom, and divineness of very Godhood.