Page:English laws for women in the nineteenth century.djvu/171

159 struggling against a great wrong, with good friends, and clear intelligence; Suppose her, friendless, helpless, foolish, ignorant, and obscure; is she, therefore, to be cheated, by the visionary supposition that she is one with the husband, whose only assertion of a husband's right is to defraud and oppress her?

A feature in that "oneness" which occurred in my case, (and I think there is scarcely any result of this anomalous position, that I have not learned by personal and grievous experience), is, that a married woman (being non-existent) cannot prosecute for libel. Her husband must prosecute. When the first attempt was made by me to recover my children, I wrote two pamphlets on the law as it then stood. One of these pamphlets was entitled, "Separation of Mother and Child, by the Law of Custody of Infants, considered": and the other, "A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor, by Pearce Stevenson." The British and Foreign Quarterly Review published a long and vehement article against any change in the law. In the course of that article, they undertook to notice my pamphlet and my story; and to prove that it was entirely for me, (and most unfairly, for me), that any such change had been planned. The article was full of distorted inventions, which formed a curious contrast with the grandiloquent motto in the title-page of the book:—"In primisque hominis est propria veri inquisitio at que investigatio." The whole history of my conduct, and the conduct of others, was falsified. I was condemned in the most vehement and unsparing terms. The fact that the Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst, Lord Denman, Sir William Follett, and a host of other great authorities, were earnestly in favour of a change in the law, was entirely overlooked, in the desire to prove a vicious influence on my part. And finally, attributing to me, with the most astonishing audacity, an anonymous paper in the Metropolitan Magazine, on the Grievances of Woman, (which I had never seen,—which I had never even heard of), and boldly setting name as the author in their own index,—