"The next thing that I will show you," says the author, "is _this_ particularity of law. In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together. It is true, that man and wife are one person; but understand in what manner. When a small brooke or little river incorporateth with Rhodanus, Humber, or the Thames, the poore rivulet looseth her name; it is carried and recarried with the new associate; it beareth no sway; it possesseth nothing during coverture. A woman, as soon as she is married, is called _covert_; in Latine, _nupta_,--that is, 'veiled;' as it were, clouded and overshadowed: she hath lost her streame. I may more truly, farre away, say to a married woman, Her new self is her superior; her companion, her master." Still farther: "Eve, because she had helped to seduce her husband, had inflicted upon her a special bane. See here the reason of that which I touched before,--that women have no voice in Parliament. They make no laws, they consent to none, they abrogate none. All of them are understood either married or to be married, and their desires are to their husbands. I know no remedy, though some women can shift it well enough. The common lawe here shaketh hand with divinitye." In this plain statement of the old black-letter book lies the root of the evil with which we contend: "All of them are married or to bee married, and their desires are to their husbands." Woman, single, widowed, or pursuing an independent vocation, never seems to have entered the head of the law, as a possible monster worth providing for. The world of that day believed in the _sea-serpent_, but not in her. This book, "The Lawe's Resolution of the Rights of Woman," was, so far as I know, first brought under our notice by Mrs. Bodichon's quotation, in her "Brief Summary of the English Law." Then a few copies found their way to this country, and into the hands of curious persons. People began to wonder who wrote the quaint old book. In pleading before our own Legislature in the spring of 1858, I was myself asked by the committee who was its author; and I think it but right to rescue from oblivion the probable name of this early friend to woman and justice. It is always difficult to trace an anonymous book, and, this time, more difficult than usual, as it was probably published _after_ its author's death.