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:—