“Beg pardon, ma’am,” said the Pullman conductor, approaching Mrs. Thornton, “but we are passing over the new line, which runs north of Gila River, and a view may be had of the sleeping Montezuma now, and the passengers generally like to see it.”
“The sleeping Montezuma! What is that?” asked the lady addressed.
“It is the giant figure of an Indian resting on his back on the top of the mountain. You can see it now quite plainly from the right-hand windows of the car.”
And across the plain—in centuries gone densely peopled by some prehistoric race, and then for centuries a waste, and, since the completion of the Gila Canal, a checker-board of orchard, vineyard, and meadow, the eye looked upon the lavender-tinted mountains to the northward, and it required no aid from the imagination to behold, upon the summits of those mountains, the profile of a stately figure and majestic face, with a crown of feathers upon the brow, lying upon its back.
Once there lived, in the shadow of this giant, a race, of which traces may still be found in mounds containing pottery, and in the ruins of great aqueducts, and in stone houses seven stories in height, a portion of the walls of which are still standing.
“The Indians hereabouts have a story,” said the conductor, “to the effect that Montezuma went to sleep, when the sun dried up the waters, and his people died, and they say now that Morning’s canal is making the country green again, the old chief will awaken.”
“You were saying,” said Doctor Eustace, by way of suggestion to the stranger, “that there are some peculiar marriage contract laws here.”
“It is all expressed, sir, in the preamble to the law, and in the law itself, a copy of which I happen to have with me, as I am on the way to attend court at Yuma. Here it is,” and he offered the book to Professor Thornton.
“Read it aloud, professor,” said the doctor, and the professor read:—
“The Senate and Assembly of the State of Arizona recognizes the truth that not easy divorce laws, but easy marriage laws, are at the root of the conjugal evil; that men and women have been accustomed to marry, disagree, and divorce in less time than should have been allowed for a proper period of betrothal; that the loose system now prevailing often results in children destitute of the inherent virility of virtue and affection; that no adequate defenses have hitherto been builded for the protection of young females too unthoughtful and too trusting; that the laws underlying the physical as well as the mental constitution, with their multiple of subtile, gravitating, and repellant forces, have hitherto been wholly unstudied, or disregarded; that the arbitrary conditions of society compel woman to accept marriage, in violation of her higher aims; that in certain human organizations the conditions created by propinquity are altogether false and ephemeral; that certain other human organizations are, by nature, filled with inordinate vanity and self-love, which qualities, beguiling the judgment, constitute fickleness and instability of purpose, and that the true solution of the great social problem is likely to be found in preventive rather than in remedial laws. Therefore, be it enacted”—