Page:Bigamy and Polygamy - Reed - c. 1879.pdf/29

 had eyes enough to see one side of the situation, if it had not enough to see the other. It had no difficulty in discerning the wants of those whose interest in the matter was purely fantastical and visionary; it failed altogether to perceive the needs of those whose interests were vital and momentous. Its whole body was full of light, and warmed with sympathy toward such as were not, it was shrouded in darkness and chilled with austerity toward those who were to be ground to powder and trodden into the earth, as the consequence of its decree. If its mission had been to pronounce upon the fate of a horde of rats, instead of that of a colony of human beings, it could not have manifested more tenderness in behalf of those with whom its sensibilities were in unison, nor more indifference to the sufferings of those whom it delivered over to the executioner.

It does not follow because, in times of dominating ecclesiastical influence, and under the auspices of a church—which always discountenanced marriage, and surrounded it with arbitrary rules and restrictions; some of which still remain—the British parliament passed an act to prohibit and punish polygamy, in a country where there was no polygamy, that it is just for the Congress of the United States to enact statutes which, in effect, dissolve the marriages of a community where polygamy has obtained, and institute disorder through the outlawry of its domestic relations. Here is a difference so broad that it would seem as if no extraordinary exercise of judicial perspicacity were needed for its comprehension. The statute of James the First was simply brutum fulmen—a piece of harmless theological thunder. It dissolved no pluralities; for there were none to dissolve. It prevented none; for there was no tendency to their contraction. The extreme punishment which it denounced against offenders—that of death —is proof of the barbarism of the period and the bigotry of the church to which it owed its origin. It is no credit to the Supreme Court of the United States to have unearthed this still-born and loathsome remain of past ecclesiastical despotism and regal superstition, and brought it to light, in the character of a law of opinion and conduct, in a land which so loudly professes to be emancipated from every form of prelatical and sacerdotal bondage. This is fishing in waterless pools and bringing forth the corpses of the reptiles that had famished there, to be resuscitated and recommissioned for more mischiefs and fresh empoisonments.

It docs not follow even if there had been polygamy in England at the time, that the law of the age of that superstitious pedant