Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/428

Rh marriage and upon the Divine Word." That assertion we denounced as an unfounded and wicked calumny. We also objected to it as an evasion of the main question. Thereupon the Watchman, instead of correcting its mistake and discussing the question of suffrage, repeats the charge, and seeks to sustain it by garbled quotations and groundless assertions, which we stigmatized accordingly. The Watchman now calls upon us to retract the stigma. We prefer to prove that our censure is deserved, and proceed to do so.

The first quotation of the Watchman is from an editorial in the Woman's Journal, entitled "Political Organization." The object of which was to show the propriety of doing what the Watchman refuses to do—viz.: of discussing woman suffrage upon its own merits. It showed the unfairness of complicating the question with other topics upon which friends of woman suffrage honestly differ. It regretted that "many well-meaning people insist on dragging in their peculiar views on theology, temperance, marriage, race, dress, finance, labor, capital—it matters not what." It condemned "a confusion of ideas which have no logical connection," and protested "against loading the good ship, Woman Suffrage, with a cargo of irrelevant opinions." The Watchman cites this article as an admission that some of the friends of suffrage advocate free love. Not at all. The editor of the Watchman is himself one of the well meaning people alluded to. He insists on dragging in irrelevant theological and social questions. He refuses to confine himself to the issue of suffrage. The Watchman quotes a single sentence of the following statement:

The advocates of woman's equality differ utterly upon every other topic. Some are abolitionists, others hostile to the equality of races. Some are evangelical Christians; others Catholics, Unitarians, Spiritualists, or Quakers. Some hold the most rigid theories with regard to marriage and divorce; others are latitudinarian on these questions. In short, people of the most opposite views agree in desiring to establish woman suffrage, while they anticipate very different results from the reform, when effected.

The above is cited as evidence against us. How so? A man may hold "latitudinarian theories in regard to marriage and divorce" without "throwing scorn upon the marriage relation," or having the slightest sympathy with free-love. For instance: The present law of Vermont is latitudinarian is these very particulars., It grants divorce for many other causes than adultery. Measured by the more conservative standard of Henry Ward Beecher and Mary A. Livermore, it allows divorce upon insufficient grounds. This law represents the public sentiment of a majority of the people of Vermont. Will the Watchman assert that the people of Vermont "throw scorn on the marriage relation"? Or that he is in "low company" because he is surrounded by the citizens of a State who entertain views upon the marriage relation less rigid than his own? Our indignant protest against the injustice of the common law, which subjects the person, property, earnings and children of married women to the irresponsible control of their husbands, is not a protest against marriage. It is a vindication of marriage, against the barbarism of the law which de-