my daughters and I went on to Washington to celebrate the seventieth birthday of Miss Anthony, who has always been to them as a second mother. Mrs. Blatch made a speech at the celebration, and Mrs. Lawrence gave a recitation. First came a grand supper at the Riggs House. The dining room was beautifully decorated; in fact, Mr. and Mrs. Spofford spared no pains to make the occasion one long to be remembered. May Wright Sewall was the mistress of ceremonies. She read the toasts and called on the different speakers. Phoebe Couzins, Rev. Anna Shaw, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Clara B. Colby, Senator Blair of New Hampshire, and many others responded. I am ashamed to say that we kept up the festivities till after two o'clock. Miss Anthony, dressed in dark velvet and point lace, spoke at the close with great pathos. Those of us who were there will not soon forget February 15, 1890.
After speaking before committees of the Senate and House, I gave the opening address at the annual convention. Mrs. Stanton Blatch spoke a few minutes on the suffrage movement in England, after which we hurried off to New York, and went on board the Aller, one of the North German Lloyd steamers, bound for Southampton. At the ship we found Captain Milinowski and his wife and two of my sons waiting our arrival. As we had eighteen pieces of baggage it took Mrs. Blatch some time to review them. My phaeton, which we decided to take, filled six boxes. An easy carriage for two persons is not common in England. The dogcarts prevail, the most uncomfortable vehicles one can possibly use. Why some of our Americans drive in those uncomfortable carts is a question. I think it is because they are "so English." The only reason the English use them is because they are cheap. The tax on two wheels is one-half what it is on four, and in England all carriages are taxed. Before we Americans adopt fashions because they are English, we had better find out the raison d'être for their existence.
We had a very pleasant, smooth voyage, unusually so for blustering February and March. As I dislike close staterooms, I remained in the ladies' saloon night and day, sleeping on a sofa. After a passage of eleven days we landed at Southampton, March 2, 1890. It was a beautiful moonlight night and we had a pleasant ride on the little tug to the wharf. We reached Basingstoke at eleven o'clock, found the family well and all things in order.
Chapter XXVI.
My Last Visit to England.
As soon as we got our carriage put together Hattie and I drove out every day, as the roads in England are in fine condition all the year round. We had lovely weather during the spring, but the summer was wet and cold. With reading, writing, going up to London, and receiving visitors, the months flew by without our accomplishing half the work we proposed.
As my daughter was a member of the Albemarle Club, we invited several friends to dine with us there at different times. There we had a long talk with Mr. Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, on his position in regard to Russian affairs, "The Deceased Wife's Sister Bill," and the divorce laws of England. Mr. Stead is a fluent talker as well as a good writer. He is the leader of the social purity movement in England. The wisdom of his course toward Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. Parnell was questioned by many; but there is a touch of the religious fanatic in Mr. Stead, as in many of his followers.
There were several problems in social ethics that deeply stirred the English people in the year of our Lord 1890. One was Charles Stewart Parnell's platonic friendship with Mrs. O'Shea, and the other was the Lord Chancellor's decision in the case of Mrs. Jackson. The pulpit, the press, and the people vied with each other in trying to dethrone Mr. Parnell as the great Irish leader, but the united forces did not succeed in destroying his self-respect, nor in hounding him out of the British Parliament, though, after a brave and protracted resistance on his part, they did succeed in hounding him into the grave.
It was pitiful to see the Irish themselves, misled by a hypocritical popular sentiment in England, turn against their great leader, the only one they had had for half a century who was able to keep the Irish question uppermost in the House of Commons year after year. The course of events since his death has proved the truth of what he told them, to wit: that there was no sincerity in the interest English politicians manifested in the question of Home Rule, and that the debates on that point would cease as soon as it was no longer forced on their consideration. And now when they have succeeded in killing their leader, they begin to realize their loss. The question evolved through the ferment of social opinions was concisely stated, thus: "Can a man be a great leader, a statesman, a general, an admiral, a learned chief justice, a trusted lawyer, or skillful physician, if he has ever broken the Seventh Commandment?"
I expressed my opinion in the Westminster Review, at the time, in the affirmative. Mrs. Jacob Bright, Mrs. Ellen Battelle Dietrick of Boston, Kate Field, in her Washington, agreed with me. Many other women spoke out promptly in the negative, and with a bitterness against those who took the opposite view that was lamentable.
The Jackson case was a profitable study, as it brought out other questions of social ethics, as well as points of law which were ably settled by the Lord Chancellor. It seems that immediately after Mr. and Mrs. Jackson were married, the groom was compelled to go to Australia. After two years he returned and claimed his bride, but in the interval she felt a growing aversion and determined not to live with him. As she would not even see him, with the assistance of friends he kidnaped her one day as she was coming out of church, and carried her to his home, where he kept her under surveillance until her friends, with a writ of habeas corpus, compelled him to bring her into court. The popular idea "based on the common law of England," was, that the husband had this absolute right. The lower court, in harmony with this idea, maintained the husband's right, and remanded her to his keeping, but the friends appealed to the higher court and the Lord Chancellor reversed the decision.
With regard to the right so frequently claimed, giving husbands the power to seize, imprison, and chastise their wives, he said: "I am of the opinion that no such right exists in law. I am of the opinion that no such right ever did exist in law. I say that no English subject has the right to imprison another English subject, whether his wife or not." Through this decision the wife walked out of the court a free woman. The passage of the Married Women's Property Bill in England in 1882 was the first blow at the old idea of coverture, giving to wives their rights of property, the full benefit of which they are yet to realize when clearer-minded men administer the laws. The decision of the Lord Chancellor, rendered March 18, 1891, declaratory of the personal rights of married women, is a still more important blow by just so much as the rights of person are more sacred than the rights of property.
One hundred years ago, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield gave his famous decision in the Somerset case, "That no slave could breathe on British soil," and the slave walked out of court a free man. The decision of the Lord Chancellor, in the Jackson case, is far more important, more momentous in its consequences, as it affects not only one race but one-half of the entire human family. From every point of view this is the greatest legal decision of the century. Like the great Chief Justice of the last century, the Lord Chancellor, with a clearer vision than those about him, rises into a purer atmosphere of thought, and vindicates the eternal principles of justice and the dignity of British law, by declaring all statutes that make wives the bond slaves of their husbands, obsolete.
How long will it be in our Republic before some man will arise, great enough to so interpret our National Constitution as to declare that women, as citizens of the United States, cannot be governed by laws in the making of which they have no part? It is not Constitutional amendments nor statute laws we need, but judges on the bench of our Supreme Court, who, in deciding great questions of human rights, shall be governed by the broad principles of justice rather than precedent. One interesting feature in the trial of the Jackson case, was that both Lady Coleridge and the wife of the Lord Chancellor were seated on the bench, and evidently much pleased with the decision.
It is difficult to
