Blackstone lays down, in his world-famous "Commentaries on the Laws of England," that the first of the "absolute rights of every Englishman" is "the legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of his life, his limbs, his body, his health, and his reputation" (9th ed., bk. 1, p. 129). The second right is personal liberty, and he says: "the confinement of a person in anywise is an imprisonment. So that the keeping; a man against his will in a private house.... is an imprisonment" (Ibid, 136): The third is property, "which consists in the free use and enjoyment of all his acquisitions, without any control or diminution, save only by the laws of the land" (Ibid, 138). A subordinate right, necessary for the enforcement of the others, is "that of applying to the courts of justice for redress of injuries." I shall proceed to show that a married woman is deprived of these rights by the mere fact of her marriage. In the first place, by marriage a woman loses her legal existence; the law does not recognize her, excepting in some few cases, when it becomes conscious of her existence in order to punish her for some crime or misdemeanour. Black-stone says--and no subsequent legislation has in any way modified his dictum: "By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and _cover_, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-French a _feme covert"_ (p. 442). "Husband and wife are one person in law" (Comyn's Digest, 5th ed., vol. ii., p. 208), and from this it follows that "by no conveyance at the common law could the husband give an estate to his wife;" that "a. husband cannot covenant or contract with his wife," even for her own advantage, and that any prenuptial contract made with her as to money she shall enjoy for her separate use after marriage, becomes void as soon as she is married. All covenants for the wife's benefit must be made with some one else, and the husband must covenant with some other man or unmarried woman who acts as trustee for the wife. This is the fundamental wrong from which all the others flow: "'Husband and wife are one person,' and that one is the husband." The wife's body, her reputation, are no longer her own. She can gain no legal redress for injury, for the law does, not recognize her existence except under cover of her husband's suit. In. some cases more modern legislation has so far become conscious of her, as to protect her against her husband, and if this protection separates her from him, it leaves her the more utterly at the mercy of the world.