Now the marriage question specially belongs to the women of the age, and not to Congress; and the Mormon women must and will make the country practically confess as much. They will do it by a movement potent enough upon this question, if they have to stir all the women of America to the issue. They are forced to this by their supreme necessities--their honor, their duty, their love, their most sacred relations. Their brothers, their husbands and their sons are threatened with prisons, for that which their religion and the Bible sanction--that Bible which Christendom for nearly two thousand years has received as the word of God. If there be a radical fault, then is the fault in their too substantial faith in that word. Surely there can be no crime in a Bible faith, else Christendom had been under a condemnation that eternity itself would not outlive. But the damnation of Congress and the regenerators is to be visited upon the heads of the innocent--for the shaping of the case is making the sisters in the eye of the law dishonored women. The very spies and minions of the court enter their marriage chamber--sacred among even barbarians--to find the evidence for prosecution, or to drag them to the witness-box, to testify against their husbands, or disown them to screen them from punishment. Not in the history of civilization has there been such a monstrous example before. Claggett has said, in Congress, of their marriage, "That it tears the crown jewel from the diadem of woman's purity, and takes from her the holy bond which honors her in all the nations of the earth; which has elevated lechery to the dignity of a religious dogma, and burns incense upon the altars of an unhallowed lust; and above all, and as a crime against the future, which ages of forgiveness cannot condone nor the waters of ocean wash out, which yearly writes in letters that blister as they fall, the word 'bastard' across the branded brows of an army of little children. Such an institution is not entitled by any right, either human or divine, to hide the hideous deformity of its nakedness with the mantle of religion, nor seek shelter under the protecting aegis of the civil law." [Applause from Congress.]