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The jurisdiction of the written law, is limited to that which it has created or erected. If it has authority to fix the terms of the domestic relations, it is because it has previously established or sanctioned such relations. Now, in all the records of legislation, organic or statutory, there is not to be found a single section or clause by which marriage is ordained. Even the Levitical law, which antedates all other known written institutes, tales the domestic relations as they pre-existed its delivery.

The unsound doctrine, in the foregoing, begins with the palpable fallacy that there can be no law of higher authority than that which is written in constitutions; and continues with the equally faulty precept that legislative power is absolute in cases in which it is not limited by express constitutional provisions. This makes human free, agency a matter of donation; and—in the absence of paramount written provisions to the contrary—reduces all the relations of life beneath the jurisdiction of the legislature assemblies. And, as a legislative power, when once vested is plenary, it makes every mode of contracting lawful or unlawful accordingly as such assemblies may see fit to prescribe. Wedlock ceases to be a natural right or an ordinance of divine appointment, and becomes a franchise which legislatures may, at their discretion, confer or withhold. According to this doctrine, it is as well within the power of these bodies to abolish monogamy as polygamy. This will be acceptable information to a large number of active social reformers in the United States, who find the marital league a bondage so severe and humiliating, a yoke so galling and oppressive, and a cause of so many evils and miseries, that they are unable to restrain their cries for relief through its abolition. Nor is there anything irrational in looking forward to the time when politicians will find it for their interest to sympathize with these sufferers under the despotism of custom and prejudice, as they have with others in similar distress; for if there is anything with which a politician who needs votes will not sympathize, that thing is yet to be discerned. When this state of things shall have arrived, legislative bodies, judging from the history of the past, will have no difficulty in finding reasons why the voice of the oppressed should be heard and the prayers of their petitions