While the counts contain concrete statements, the closing clause--"the law in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands"--sets forth an abstract idea in justification of which they furnish no proof. In the counts as they stood in the Declaration of Sentiments, the general laws were not accused of doing any injustice, personal or civil, to an unmarried woman, except in reference to the one matter of withholding the vote, which they claimed was wrong because she had an inalienable right to the ballot and was subject to tax. Not a personal law did they ask to have changed for her protection. They recognized the fact that, unless she was married, a woman in the United States stood upon a legal equality with man. The hue and cry in regard to a married woman was, that she was not treated as if _femme sole_. The _femme sole_ could make contracts and wills, sue and be sued, and do all and sundry in her own name that her brother could do. With a married woman the situation was different. Will any one contend that in the past the married woman has been held in less honor than the unmarried? Can it be thought for a moment that the law-makers expressed their contempt for wives and mothers, and their respect for daughters and sisters who were unmarried? Tradition and fact, poetry and prose, romance and reality, all go to prove that the reverential feeling of the world has gathered about the wife and the mother. The men who made those laws turned for their ideals of abstract justice to their mothers' faith and teaching; and it seems most incongruous to assume, as do the Suffrage arguments, that, while all the laws relating to women were tyrannical at some point, those in regard to married women were the ones wherein men embodied their most cruel and revengeful feeling. It also appears to be a gratuitous assumption that whatever was different in the legal treatment of men and women came from man's belief in his own supremacy, especially toward the wife into whose hands he had committed the keeping of his home and his honor.