In 1881, after more than thirty years of agitation of the subject, the Suffrage leaders said: "The condition of married women under the laws of all countries has been essentially that of slaves, until modified in some respects, within the last quarter of a century, in the United States." And again they said: "The change from the old common law of England, in regard to the civil rights of women, from 1848 to the advance legislation in most of the Northern States in 1880, marks an era both in the status of woman as a citizen and in our American system of jurisprudence. When the State of New York gave married women certain rights of property, the individual existence of the wife was recognized, and the old idea that husband and wife are one, and that one the husband, received its death-blow. From that hour the statutes of the several States have been steadily diverging from the old English codes. Most of the Western States copied the advance legislation of New York, and some are now even more liberal." This sentence contains another of the constantly recurring instances of the methods by which the Suffrage mind jumps to unwarranted conclusions. When the State of New York gave married women certain property rights, it recognized their legal existence in a new way, but not their individual existence--that had been recognized by every act of law and custom, from the registry of their birth to that of their marriage or their death. Socially and civilly, every woman in the United States had had opportunity to make her individuality felt, and if there was any difference in advantage in respect of this, it was supposed to lie with the married woman. So true is this, that Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Mott had to hunt for oppressive laws, and most of the women of this land have no real sense of the great and liberal change in laws concerning married women since 1848. I am no more approving of or admiring the old English common law, or the canon law, concerning women, than I am approving of or admiring the law that came to light recently in the Transvaal and would have allowed the torture of Jameson and his men, who, as a matter of fact, were allowed to go almost unpunished. The law of the Dutch Government in Africa belonged to the Middle Ages; their conduct belonged to to-day. I only believe that at the time when it was possible for one man to frame for another man such laws of physical and mental torment as every code reveals, their laws for women were the best they could devise, and were those which led to the freedom of the women of to-day. A law of England still favors only the first-born son, and he only because he is the firstborn. What wonder that girls have been denied succession; and what an evidence of man's desire to show favor and not the "insult incident to sex," that he has placed woman on thrones upon which he has had to sustain her by main force.