In ascertaining that position, we have to guide us, the experience of the world for the six thousand years of its recorded existence, we have the spectacle of the various nations of the earth at the present hour. We have before us every possible variety of experiment and the result of each, from the condition of Asia, where woman, from time immemorial, has been little better than a slave, to Our own Republic, in which she has been elevated to the nearest practicable degree of civil and social equality.

From all those sources of information we gather, that woman has a right to claim, or it is expedient that she should enjoy, education, personal liberty, equal rights of marriage, and the equal distribution and security of property. By the enjoyment of these rights, woman is placed in her appropriate sphere, and then she contributes her full share to the happiness, the virtue, the security, the welfare of the race. When deprived of any of them, the injustice is more than avenged by the degradation and wretchedness, which that very injustice is sure to occasion to every member of society.

Woman has a right to an equality with

man in the fundamental relation of marriage. It is for the interest and the happiness of both parties that it should be so. The best security for the reality and genuineness of those affections which ought to unite husband and wife, is the freedom of their choice, and the equality of the contracting parties. Freedom and equality give the greatest tenderness and delicacy to the domestic affections. Those affections, when left free, tend to ennoble both before the formation of the marriage tie. That which is voluntary will be compassed by other attractions than personal charms, and a return of affection will be sought, not only by assiduity, but by merit. Here then there is an exalting influence exerted upon both sexes from early life, by the very prospect of a negotiation in which character will inevitably be taken into account. And nothing, perhaps, besides religious motives, exercises a more decisive influence over both sexes in the forming period of life.

In countries where woman is a mere slave, is sought without affection, and is given away from sordid interest, no such influence is exerted. Character has nothing to do with the transaction, and therefore character is not

affected by it for good. A relation entered into without affection, and unaccompanied by esteem, exerts no ennobling influence upon either party; and beginning neither in affection nor esteem, it will prompt to no cultivation of either tenderness or merit, by which that affection and esteem might be perpetuated and secured.

Such would be the fact in countries where the rights of marriage were equal, and every man compelled to restrict himself to one wife, as well as every woman to one husband. But throughout Asia, and the barbarous parts of the rest of the world, the social wrong is permitted of suffering a man to have more wives than one. This completes the degradation, first of woman, then, through her, of the whole texture of society, and lays the foundation for coarseness of manners, corruption of morals, injustice in the laws, despotism in government, and a total paralysis of enterprise, industry and improvement. In such a state of things, to use the language of a sacred writer, "The foundations of the world are out of joint." Polygamy, at this moment, is the grand incubus of the whole continent of Asia. It puts an effectual bar to all social progress

and political reform. As long as it exists, men will be tyrants, and women will be slaves. The sin is immediately visited upon all, for the women have the most important part of education in their own hands, and they mould each rising generation. Ignorant, and without moral education themselves, they are precisely fitted to train up each rising generation to a moral fitness to inherit the vices and degradation of their ancestors.

It is a remarkable fact, that the Bible, originating as it did in Asia, in its first pages records its protest against this stupendous abuse. It celebrates the first nuptials between one man and one woman. It represents one man and one woman only to have been first created, thus making the law of revelation coincide with the law of nature, since the equality of the sexes is kept up in the births of children among all nations. Polygamy, though discouraged by the spirit of the Mosaic institutions, was too firmly established in the East to be rooted out, even among the chosen people of God.

What Moses pointed out as the law of nature, Christ enacted into a positive law of Christianity, and thus laid the foundation of

the improved condition of woman, and through her, of the whole structure of society in modern times. This one principle alone is almost enough to stamp permanency and universality upon the Christian religion, from its immeasurable influence upon the moral and physical condition of the human race. The permission of polygamy, and the low estimate placed by Mohammedanism upon woman, is enough to disprove its divine original, and forbid its becoming the religion of the world. Society can never be in a sound or flourishing condition, where such principles are held, and such practices permitted. Mohammedanism was a religion of conquest; it subsisted and grew upon its prey. As soon as that prey is exhausted, it will die out. Where women are slaves, men will never be any thing more than sensualists and barbarians. Christianity, on the other hand, being based, in this respect, on the principles of human nature, and of natural justice, has in itself the elements of perpetual growth, unlimited development, and indefinite duration.

The Christian idea of the equality of woman met with a powerful auxiliary in the sentiments of the northern nations of Europe, in the Mid