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advantage he sought when he went through the formality and pretence of making a contract with me, made no difference; and as to money, even that which I earned by literature was subject to the claim of my husband, as the manual labour of the slave was subject to the claim of his master,— because a married woman is, by the code of England (as Sam Norris by the code of Kentucky), non-existent in law. It is fit that I should add, in behalf of English hearts and English love of justice, that when I stood, with that vain contract in my hand, in the Westminster County Court (I, an intelligent educated woman, granddaughter of a man sufficiently distinguished to have obtained sepulture in Westminster Abbey, hard by), and when the law was shown to be, for me, what it is for the slave in Kentucky, there was, in the court-room of the Westminster County Court, as there was in the court-room of the Covington Circuit Court, evidence of strong sympathy. My case—which opened up a history of wrong, treachery, libel, and injustice endured for years without redress—was evidently considered like that of Norris, to be "one of great hardship and cruelty," and the concluding words with which Mr Norton vehemently attempted to address the court, were drowned in the groans and hooting of an excited crowd. But sympathy could do no more for me than for Mr Patton's slave. It could not force open for me the iron gates of the Law which barred out justice. It could not prevent libel, and torment, and fraud; the ripping up of old wounds, or the infliction of new. The Law alone could do that, if fit laws of protection existed for women. That they do not exist, is my complaint.
That they do not exist, might point a scornful answer from nations we imperiously lecture on the internal economy of their own governments. We have rebuked America, taunted Naples, complained of Sweden, remonstrated with Tuscany, condemned Portugal, and positively shuddered at Austria (in the person of Haynau), because slavery in the one, the treatment of political prisoners in another, religious intolerance in a
