the age, should be corrected. As calm-minded, philanthropic men, we,
the American people, should look into this subject, and, regardless of
jeer and scoff, do what justice, humanity, and the right demand of us,
in regard to some of the social and legal inequalities between the
sexes, pertaining to the married state."

"It is one of the mysteries of our system of jurisprudence," replied
Spalding, "that while everything else is on the move, while progress
is written in letters of living light upon all other things, that
remains stationary--at least in a comparative sense. The world moves
on, civilization advances, science and the arts stride forward, but
the law stands still. A principle which may have been somewhat
changed, modified, bent, if you please, into an adaptation to the
exigencies of the present, and a fitness for the changed circumstances
of the times in which we live, is suddenly thrown back into its old
position by the exhumation of some 'decision' from the dust of ages,
made by some judge away back in the olden times, resurrected by the
research of some antiquarian lawyer, who loves to delve among the
rubbish of past generations. The learning, the wisdom, the philosophy
of the present is discarded, and the spirits of a lower civilization
are conjured from the darkness of vanished centuries, to settle rules
for the government of commerce, personal conduct, and the social
relations of the times in which we live. There seems to be something
paradoxical in the idea that the older the decision the better the
law--the more ancient the commentator, the profounder the wisdom of
his axioms. This might be well, were it true that civilization is
'progressing backwards,' the science of government retrograding. In
that case, it would of course be true, that the nearer you approach
the fountain, the purer the stream would be. But such is not the fact.
In all these attributes the world is on the advance, the science of