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
have known this man come to install himself in the chamber of a woman
who loathed him, and say she should never take food without his
company. I have known these men steal their children, whom they knew
they had no means to maintain, take them into dissolute company,
expose them to bodily danger, to frighten the poor woman, to whom, it
seems, the fact that she alone had borne the pangs of their birth, and
nourished their infancy, does not give an equal right to them.
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