[35] A curious instance of the immoral result of holding marriage
sacramental, and indissoluble under all circumstances, comes within my
personal experience while I am correcting these pages for the press,
Oct. 11, 1861.
A young Catholic girl was divorced some years ago, immediately after
marriage, on account of the bad conduct of her husband. She was
received into the family of a brother-in-law, in every way highly
respectable. For the last two years, she has been courted by an
officer in the navy of the United States; but nowhere in New England
could a Catholic priest be found willing to marry them. The church
still holds her responsible to her first vows. The officer honestly
desired to marry her; but the natural result of her ignorance and
perplexity followed. Expecting to become a mother, and rejected by her
family, she came to me for advice. As the officer is a Protestant, I
recommended that they should be married by a minister of that faith.
She again consulted her priest, and was told that it was less sinful
for her to remain in her present relation to her lover than to receive
a sacrament from unholy hands; the priest ignoring utterly the _legal_
protection and maintenance which she might thus receive.
[36] The only excuse for considering this point, in an essay pleading
especially for women, is that the law bears unequally on the two
sexes; pressing hardest on woman, on account of her pecuniary
dependence, and general subordination to man.
A woman, every reader will understand, would find it impossible to
free herself from her obligations, like the men referred to in the
text; nor is it desirable that she should _free herself_, but that the
law should free her.
[37] National Rev., Apr. 1861, pp. 291, 292.
[38] "A man who is guilty of adultery is branded by public opinion as
a forger or bigamist is elsewhere, and is not eligible to public
office during the whole of his life; which, under such a government,
is the greatest punishment that can be inflicted. A man who breaks his
promise of betrothal, or who in any way betrays a woman to
mortification and shame, is heaped with the same scorn that women
receive elsewhere. The woman who is betrayed is censured; but the man
is henceforth an outcast."--_Cottages of the Alps_, p. 288.
[39] In reprinting for his collected works Mrs. Mill's article on "The
Enfranchisement of Women," Mr. Mill more lately says, "All the more
recent of these papers were the joint production of myself, and one
whose loss, even in a merely intellectual point of view, can never be
repaired or alleviated. But the following essay is hers in a peculiar
sense; my share in it being little more than that of editor or
amanuensis. Its authorship having been known at the time, and publicly
attributed to her, it is proper to state, that she never regarded it
as a complete discussion of the subject which it treats of; and,
highly as I estimate it, I would rather it remained unacknowledged,
than that it should be read with the idea, that even the faintest
image can be found in it of a mind and heart, which, in their union of
the rarest, and what are deemed the most conflicting excellences, were
unparalleled in any human being that I have known or read of. While
she was the light, life, and grace of every society in which she took
part, the foundation of her character was a deep seriousness,
resulting from the combination of the strongest and most sensitive
feelings with the highest principles. All that excites admiration,
when found separately, in others, seemed brought together in her,--a
conscience at once healthy and tender; a generosity bounded only by a
sense of justice, which often forgot its own claims, but never those
of others; a heart so large and loving, that whoever was capable of
making the smallest return of sympathy always received tenfold; and,
in the intellectual department, a vigor and truth of imagination, a
delicacy of perception, an accuracy and nicety of observation, only
equalled by her profundity of speculative thought, and by a practical
judgment and discernment next to infallible. So elevated was the
general level of her faculties, that the highest poetry, philosophy,
oratory, or art, seemed trivial by the side of her, and equal only to
expressing some part of her mind; and there is no one of these modes
of manifestation in which she could not easily have taken the highest
rank, had not her inclination led her for the most part to content
herself with being the inspirer, prompter, and unavowed co-adjutor, of
others.
"The present paper was written to promote a cause which she had deeply
at heart; and, though appealing only to the severest reason, was meant
for the general reader. The question, in her opinion, was in a stage
in which no treatment but the most calmly argumentative could be
useful; while many of the strongest arguments were necessarily
omitted, as being unsuited for popular effect. Had she lived to write
out all her thoughts on this great question, she would have produced
something as far transcending in profundity the present essay, as, had
she not placed a rigid restraint upon her feelings, she would have
excelled it in fervid eloquence.
"Yet nothing that even she could have written on any single subject
would have given an adequate idea of the depth and compass of her
mind. As, during life, she detected, before any one else had seemed to
perceive them, those changes of time and circumstances, which, ten or
twelve years later, became subjects of general remark; so I venture to
prophesy, that, if mankind continue to improve, their spiritual
history for ages to come will be the progressive working out of her
thoughts, and the realization of her conceptions."
Such tributes, borne by noble men to noble women, are so frequently
hidden away in the heavy volumes which lie out of ordinary reach, that
I take pleasure in bringing them to support my own plea; and I only
wish I could as easily add to that in the text the charming
acknowledgments of Alexis de Tocqueville to his wife.
[40] In an article in the "Edinburgh Weekly Journal" for Jan. 10,
1827, written by Sir Walter Scott, the following allusion is made to
abuses which had crept into the army in the middle of the eighteenth
century:--
"To sum up this catalogue of abuses, _commissions_ were in some
instances bestowed upon _young ladies_, when pensions could not be
had. We know ourselves one fair dame who drew the pay of a captain in
the ---- dragoons, and was probably not much less fit for the service
than some who at that period actually did duty."
[41] "In the little brown duodecimo which contains the jottings of
'that famous lawyer, William Tothill, Esquire,' there is the following
entry, of the date of James I.:--
"'Fleshward _contra_ Jackson. Money given to a _feme covert_ for her
maintenance, because her husband is an unthrift. The husband pretends
the money to be his; but the court ordered the money to be at her own
disposal.'"--_London Quarterly_, July, 1861. A very ancient germ of a
"Married Woman's Property Law."