I would like to give you the whole of this great speech that woke up the Washington court from its state of semi-somnolency and roused it to the sense of the unjust and cruel things it sometimes did when talking in its sleep.  But I have only time and space to glance at some of its points; and if anyone wishes to see more of it, it may be found in the published works of the great jurist and orator.

He began to speak with modest confidence and in clear, concise, and earnest terms.  He said that the court had heard from the learned counsel that had preceded him a great deal of law, sentiment, and wit.  From him they should now hear of justice, mercy, and truth!

He reverted to the story of the woman’s wrongs, sufferings, and struggles, continued through many years; he spoke of her love, patience, and forbearance under the severest trials; he dwelt upon the prolonged absence of her husband, prolonged through so many weary years, and the false position of the forsaken wife, a position so much worse than widowhood, inasmuch as it exposed her not only to all the evils of poverty, but to suspicion, calumny, and insult.  But he bade them note how the woman had passed through the fire unharmed; how she had fought the battle of life bravely and come out victoriously; how she had labored on in honorable industry for years, until she had secured a home for herself and little girls.  He spoke plainly of the arrival of the fugitive husband as the coming of the destroyer who had three times before laid waste her home; he described the terror and distress his very presence in the city had brought to that little home; the flight of the mother with her children, and her agony of anxiety to conceal them; he dwelt upon the cruel position of the woman whose natural protector has become her natural enemy; he reminded the court that it had required the mother to take her trembling little ones from their places of safety and concealment and to bring them forward; and now that they were here he felt a perfect confidence that the court would extend the aegis of its authority over these helpless ones, since that would be the only shield they could have under heaven.  He spoke noble words in behalf not only of his client, but of woman—­woman, loving, feeble, and oppressed from the beginning of time—­woman, hardly dealt with by nature in the first place, and by the laws, made by her natural lover and protector, man, in the second place.  Perhaps it was because he knew himself to be the son of a woman only, even as his Master had been before him, that he poured so much of awakening, convicting, and condemning fire, force, and weight into this part of his discourse.  He uttered thoughts and feelings upon this subject, original and startling at that time, but which have since been quoted, both in the Old and New World, and have had power to modify those cruel laws which at that period made woman, despite her understanding intellect, an idiot, and despite her loving heart a chattel—­in the law.