By her husband's particular permission, she may make a will; but he may revoke his permission at any time before probate,--that is, before the will is exhibited and proved,--even if _after_ the wife's death. The custody of a child belongs to the father. The mother has no right of control. The father may dispose of it as he sees fit. If there be a legal separation, and no special order of the court, the custody of the children (except the nutriment of infants) belongs legally to the father. _Except the nutriment of infants!_ Here is a hint from the good God himself. Should we not think, that the first time these words were written down, and men were compelled to see the natural dependence of the child upon the mother,--to detect the obvious laws of nurture, natural and spiritual,--the right of a good mother to her child would have made itself clear? Yet, to this day, there are many States of our own Union where a mother can better authenticate her right to a negro slave than to the young daughter who is bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh! If the direct influence of Christianity did not, in some measure, modify the influence of the law in social life, there would be no such thing as a mother's exercising maternal authority over a son. No matter how wise, how old, how experienced, she may be, she never possesses, in the eye of the law, the dignity of a boy who has just attained his majority. Sufficiently instructed in legal maxims, he can always resist her, under the influence of the most besotted or unprincipled of fathers. The word of a married woman is not binding in law, and persons who give her credit have no remedy against her. The moral results of such a law are sufficiently obvious, not only in England, but in our own country. The statute-book does not, cannot, stand absolved, because public opinion in the present day abhors and contemns the woman who assists her husband to defraud his creditors, or takes refuge from her own debts behind this disgraceful cover. Yet, if the law gives her husband her property, it ought surely to hold _him_ responsible for her debts. And this is what society calls _protection_! As a wife is always presumed to be under the control of her husband (numerous instances to the contrary notwithstanding), she is not considered guilty of any crime which she commits in his presence. When a woman has consented to a proposal of marriage, she cannot give away the smallest thing. If she do so without her betrothed husband's consent, the gift is illegal; and, after marriage, he may avoid it as a fraud on him: a strong temptation to any woman, one would think, to give away her all. You see here what estimate the law puts on property, as an inducement to marriage. This provision evidently grew out of the exigencies of the time, when marriage among the Anglo-Saxons was a _pure_ matter of bargain.