and lending little treatises, intended to mark out with precision the
limits of Woman's sphere, and Woman's mission, to prevent other than
the rightful shepherd from climbing the wall, or the flock from using
any chance to go astray.

Without enrolling ourselves at once on either side, let us look upon
the subject from the best point of view which to-day offers; no
better, it is to be feared, than a high house-top. A high hill-top, or
at least a cathedral-spire, would be desirable.

It may well be an Anti-Slavery party that pleads for Woman, if we
consider merely that she does not hold property on equal terms with
men; so that, if a husband dies without making a will, the wife,
instead of taking at once his place as head of the family, inherits
only a part of his fortune, often brought him by herself, as if she
were a child, or ward only, not an equal partner.

We will not speak of the innumerable instances in which profligate and
idle men live upon the earnings of industrious wives; or if the wives
leave them, and take with them the children, to perform the double
duty of mother and father, follow from place to place, and threaten to
rob them of the children, if deprived of the rights of a husband, as
they call them, planting themselves in their poor lodgings,
frightening them into paying tribute by taking from them the children,
running into debt at the expense of these otherwise so overtasked
helots. Such instances count up by scores within my own memory. I have
seen the husband who had stained himself by a long course of low vice,
till his wife was wearied from her heroic forgiveness, by finding that
his treachery made it useless, and that if she would provide bread for
herself and her children, she must be separate from his ill fame--I