husband’s death, to claim her interest on her “thirds.”  This is all she can claim.  The furniture of her home, the very beds which she may have brought to the house, are included in the inventory of her husband’s effects; and, unless she agrees to accept them as part of her thirds, she may be left without, one on which to rest her weary limbs; and that, too, though the property may have been purchased with money brought by her into the matrimonial firm; or though she may have been the working-bee who in reality acquired it.  This is not an overdrawn picture.  It is the law in civilized countries; and men are found every day who avail themselves of its conditions.  That all men are not mean enough to take advantage of such laws, is no excuse for their existence.  It is barbarous that, by laws in the enacting of which women have had no voice, they are left to the mercy of unscrupulous men, without the possibility of better men coming to their help, except by repealing the iniquitous statutes.

It is quite true that all women are not made to feel the full force of this bitter oppression, because of the kindness of their husbands, or the prudent forethought of their fathers in providing for unlooked-for emergencies which might occasion poverty or distress; but the laws, and the makers of them, deserve little credit for any comfort or degree of independence enjoyed by women.  More sorrowful than it is, infinitely more sorrowful, would woman’s condition be, if true Christianity had not made many men more just than the laws require them to be.  Many of the slaves had kind masters; but was slavery any the less an iniquitous outrage upon humanity, a curse upon the land, a blot that could only be wiped away by a bloody war?  The present social condition of women is merely one system of domestic slavery, which is hourly calling out to God for redress; and, though he tarry long, yet his afflicted children’s cry is never lifted up in vain.

Society is even yet so constituted, and the minds of those who are administrators of the law so blinded, by the prejudices which long usage has established, that even the very few laws which are on record for her so-called protection, are rendered of little avail.

The sufferings of women and children from the effects of the liquor-traffic, is perfectly frightful; and what help is there for it?  Lately, in Canada, the wife may, after she is reduced to poverty, forbid the dram-seller to sell her husband any more liquor.  If he pays attention to the prohibition, well and good; if not, when in a drunken fit the husband has well-nigh killed her, she may have him bound over to keep the peace—­if she can find a magistrate who will do it—­and she may complain of the man who sold him the liquor.  Perhaps he will be fined a dollar, perhaps not.  More likely the latter, with a not very gentle hint that she has stepped out of her sphere by presuming to meddle in such matters.