THE ORIENTAL ESTIMATE AND THE FRENCH LAW. "It was not Zeus who uttered this decree, Or Justice, dwelling with the gods below: Nor did I think thy will such power possessed, That thou, a mortal, could o'errule the laws Unwritten and immovable of God." _Antigone_: SOPHOCLES. "We seldom doubt that something in the large Smooth order of creation, though no more Than haply a man's footstep, has gone wrong." E.B. BROWNING. "The law of God, positive law and positive morality, sometimes _coincide_, sometimes _do not coincide_, and sometimes _conflict_."--JOHN AUSTIN: _Province of Jurisprudence Defined_. "Of Law, no less can be said than that her seat is the bosom of God; her voice, the harmony of the spheres. All things in heaven and earth do her reverence; the greatest as needing her protection, the meanest as not afraid of her power." In reading this magnificent and well-known sentence from Hooker, the imagination is easily kindled to a divine prescience. We accept the definition. Fair before us rise the graceful proportions of eternal order in society, upon which wait present peace and future progress; towards which those bow most reverently who live most purely and see most clearly. But alas! if the reader be a woman, her heart may well sink when the enthusiasm of the moment has passed; and she must ask, with a feeling somewhat akin to displeasure, "Of _what_ law realized on earth, administered in courts, dealt out from legislatures or parliaments, from republics or autocrats, were these sublime words written?" Where in the soft shadows of Oriental hareems, in the gloom of Hindoo caves, Egyptian pyramids, or Attic porches, sculptured by divinest art, and luminous with marbles of every hue; where in the porticos echoing to Roman stoicism, or the baths floating on Roman license; where in the saloons of French society, or by the hearths of good old England; where, alas! in the free States of America, whether North or South,--has a system of law prevailed that women could think of, without blasphemy, as sitting in the bosom of God, and so entitled to the reverence of man? We outgrow all things. Always the new patch breaks the fabric of the old garment; always the new wine shatters the well-dried leathern pouch which held the vintage of our ancestors. But most of all do we outgrow, have we outgrown, our laws. They fall back, dead letters, into the abyss of that past from which we have emerged. We put new laws upon the statute-book, and do not pause to wipe out the old; finding our protection in the public feeling and the public progress, if not in the traditions of the elders.