"OF Law, no less can be said than that her seat is the bosom of God; her voice, the harmony of the spheres. All things in heaven and earth do her reverence; the greatest as needing her protection, the meanest as not afraid of her power."
In reading this magnificent and well-known sentence from Hooker, the imagination is easily kindled to a divine prescience. We accept the definition. Fair before us rise the graceful proportions of eternal order in society, upon which wait present peace and future progress; towards which those bow most reverently who live most purely and see most clearly. But alas! if the reader be a woman, her heart may well sink when the enthusiasm of the moment has passed; and she must ask, with a feeling somewhat akin to displeasure, "Of what law realized on earth, administered in courts, dealt out from legislatures or parliaments, from republics or autocrats, were these sublime words written?"
Where in the soft shadows of Oriental hareems, in the gloom of Hindoo caves, Egyptian pyramids, or Attic porches, sculptured by divinest art, and luminous with marbles of every hue; where in the porticos echoing to Roman stoicism, or the baths floating on Roman license; where in the saloons of French society, or by the hearths of good old England; where, alas! in the free States of America, whether North or South,—has a system of law prevailed that women could think of, without blasphemy, as sitting in the bosom of God, and so entitled to the reverence of man?
We outgrow all things. Always the new patch breaks the fabric of the old garment; always the new wine shatters the well-dried leathern pouch which held the vintage of our ancestors. But most of all do we outgrow, have we outgrown, our laws. They fall back, dead letters, into the abyss of that past from which we have emerged. We put new laws upon the statute-book, and do not pause to wipe out the old; finding our protection in the public feeling and the public progress, if not in the traditions of the elders.
This, and this only, saves old systems from violent demolition. Were the State of Connecticut at this moment to attempt to put in force such of the blue-laws as are technically unrepealed, she would be met by the open rebellion of her highest officer; and the chief-justice who should attempt to fine a bishop for kissing his wife on Sunday might shake hands cordially with the chief-justice who once ruled that a man might beat his wife with a stick no bigger than his thumb!
The laws which relate to woman are based, for the most part, on a very old and a very Oriental estimate of her nature, her powers, and her divinely ordained position. We shall see this, if we follow the course of legal enactments or religious prohibitions from the beginning. When the subject of Woman's Civil Rights first came to be considered, it was customary to quote from the scholars one of the sayings of Vishnu Sarma: "Every book of knowledge which is known to Oosana or to Vreehaspatee is by nature implanted in the understandings of women."
Nobody asked what sort of knowledge was known to these two deities; but most readers took it for granted that it was divine: and ordinary people asked why, if society began with this reverent faith, we had nothing better now than the practical scepticism of priest and lawyer. When the names of these two deities were translated into Venus and Mercury (that is, into love and cunning), the announcement seemed more in keeping with the subsequent revelations of Vishnu Sarma:—
"Women, at all times," he says, "have been inconstant, even among the Celestials."
"Woman's virtue is founded upon a modest countenance, precise behavior, rectitude, and a deficiency of suitors."
"In infancy, the father should guard her; in youth, her husband; in old age, her children: for at no time is a woman fit to be trusted with liberty."
"Infidelity, violence, deceit, envy, extreme avarice, a total want of good qualities, with impurity, are the innate faults of womankind."
These extracts will throw some light, perhaps, upon the knowledge of Oosana and Vreehaspatee, and will save modern women from any very strong desire to restore the "good old rule." After such a commentary on this seeming compliment, we shall not think it strange, that, in a country where dialect is the exponent of condition, the most ancient drama represents the Hindoo wife as addressing her lord and master in the dialect of a slave.
"It is proper," says an ancient Hindoo scripture, "for every woman, after her husband's death, to burn herself in the fire with his corpse." I quote this saying here only to advert to the power of public opinion, which has been strong enough for ages to compel this sacrifice. But for it, many a woman, who had been burnt during her whole conjugal life in the fires of tyranny, self-will, and arrogant dominion, might have hailed with joy the hour of her release. Under it, such a woman went calmly to the new martyrdom.