In New York efforts were now being made to gain support for a liberal divorce bill, patterned after the Indiana law, and a variety of proposals were before the legislature, making drunkenness, insanity, desertion, and cruel and abusive treatment grounds for divorce. Horace Greeley in his _Tribune_ had been vigorously opposing a more liberal law for New York, while Robert Dale Owen of Indiana wrote in its defense. Everywhere people were reading the Greeley-Owen debates in the _Tribune_. Through his widely circulated paper, Horace Greeley had in a sense become an oracle for the people who felt he was safe and good; while Robert Dale Owen, because of his youthful association with the New Harmony community and Frances Wright, was branded with radicalism which even his valuable service in the Indiana legislature and his two terms in Congress could not blot out. Susan and Mrs. Stanton had no patience with Horace Greeley's smug old-fashioned opinions on marriage and divorce. In fact these Greeley-Owen debates in the _Tribune_ were the direct cause of their decision to bring this subject before the convention, where they hoped for support from their liberal friends. They counted especially on Lucy Stone, who seemed to give her approval when she wrote, "I am glad you will speak on the divorce question, provided you yourself are clear on the subject. It is a great grave topic that one shudders to grapple, but its hour is coming.... God touch your lips if you speak on it."[110] Neither Susan nor Mrs. Stanton shuddered to grapple with any subject which they believed needed attention. In fact, the discussion of marriage and divorce in woman's rights conventions had been on their minds for some time. Three years before Susan had written Lucy, "I have thought with you until of late that the Social Question must be kept separate from Woman's Rights, but we have always claimed that our movement was _Human Rights_, not Woman's specially.... It seems to me we have played on the surface of things quite long enough. Getting the right to hold property, to vote, to wear what dress we please, etc., are all to the good, but _Social Freedom_, after all, lies at the bottom of all, and unless woman gets that she must continue the slave of man in all other things."[111] * * * * *