"I have very distinct recollections of the whole history of this very radical measure. Judge Fine, of St. Lawrence, was its originator, and he gave me his reasons for introducing the bill. He said that he married a lady who had some property of her own, which he had, all his life, tried to keep distinct from his, that she might have the benefit of her own, in the event of any disaster happening to him in pecuniary matters. He had found much difficulty, growing out of the old laws, in this effort to protect his wife's interests.... I, too, had special reasons for desiring this change in the law. I had a young daughter, who, in the then condition of my health, was quite likely to be left in tender years without a father, and I very much desired to protect her in the little property I might be able to leave.... I believe this law originated with Judge Fine, without any outside prompting. On the third day of the session he gave notice of his intention to introduce it, and only one petition was presented in favor of the bill, and that came from Syracuse, and was due to the action of my personal friends.... We all felt that the laws regulating married women's, as well as married men's, rights demanded careful revision and adaptation to our times and to our civilization.... In reply to your inquiries in regard to debates that preceded the action of 1848, I must say I know of none, and I am quite sure that in our long discussions no allusion was made to anything of the kind." It would thus appear that neither Mrs. Gage, nor Mrs. Stanton, nor Miss Anthony knew the names of the proposer and defenders of the bill that opened the way in New York for all the liberal legislation that has followed, and thirty years after its passage they inquired whether any debates had preceded it. Certainly, then, their own had not. It is also evident how much "selfishness" prompted the bill. In a pamphlet published by the New York Woman-Suffrage Association to report their proceedings during the Constitutional Convention of 1894, it is recorded that Mr. F. B. Church, of Alleghany, presented an appeal from his county asking for the suffrage. In the course of his remarks he said: "Sir, beginning in 1848, the male citizens of the State of New York, not at the clamor of the women, as I understand it, but actuated by a sense of justice, began to remove the disabilities under which women labored at that time. Gradually, from that time on, the barriers had been stricken away, until, in 1891, I believe, the last impediments were removed."