[58] Our laws are based on the all-sufficiency of man’s rights; society exists for men only; for women, merely in so far as they are represented by some man, are in the mundt, or keeping of some man. Herbert Spencer.—Descriptive Sociology, England.
[59] A committee appointed by the National Woman Suffrage Association, at that time in convention assembled in Washington, waited upon President Cleveland with the memorial.
[60] Mediaeval Christian husbands imprisoned erring wives in cages so small they could neither stand upright nor lie down at full length. Mediaeval Christian priests boiled living infants in osier baskets in presence of helpless heretical mothers. In mediaeval times the public scourging of women was one of the amusements of the carnival; even as late as the eighteenth century English gentlemen, according to Herbert Spencer, made up parties of pleasure to see women whipped at Bridewell.
[61] Seduction was connived at that the guardian might secure the estate of the ward.—Ibid.
[62] The Salic law had not preference to one sex over the other—purely economical law which gave houses and lands to males who should dwell there, and consequently to whom it would be of most service.—Spirit of the Laws.
[63] In order to give color to the usurpation (for it was nothing better), the lawyers cited an obscure article from the code of the barbarous Salians, which, as they pretended had always been the acknowledged law of the French monarchy.... Since that time the Salic law, as it is called, has been regarded as an essential constitutional principle in France.—Student’s History of France, p. 19.
[64] Montesquieu.—Spirit of the Laws.
[65] Women in England were for more than a thousand years legislated for as slaves. Crimes committed by men which could be atoned for by a fine, were by women punished with burning alive. The period is not very distant when she was distinctly legislated for as a servant and but on a level with chattel slaves.—Hist. Crime in England.
[66] American Law, 1829.
[67] Through the influence of Governor M. Nutt, who instituted many reforms.