dungeon held. More injustice is committed
there than in the vilest Austrian prison
known. If the gaoler-marital be a decent
fellow, and in love with his prisoner, things
may go on smoothly enough. But if he be a
man of coarse or fickle passions—if he be a
man without conscientiousness or honour—if
he be a man of violent temper, of depraved
habits, of reckless life, he may ill-treat, ruin,
and destroy his prisoner at his pleasure—all
in the name of the law, and by virtue of his
conjugal rights. The prisoner-wife is not
recognised by the law; she is her gaoler's
property, the same as his dog or his horse;
with this difference, that he cannot openly
sell her; and if he maim or murder her he is
liable to punishment, as he would be to
prosecution by the Cruelty to Animals' Society,
if he maimed or ill-treated his dog or his
horse. As "the very legal being of the wife
is suspended during the marriage, or at least
incorporated and consolidated with that of
the husband" (vide Blackstone), it is therefore
simply as a sentient animal, not as a
wife, nor as a citizeness, that she can claim
the protection of the laws; and then only in
cases of personal and distinct brutality which
threatens her life. The same protection, and
only the same, as is granted to slaves in the
United States—as is granted to all sentient
and domesticated animals in most civilised
communities. The prisoner-wife has no
property. All that she possessed before her
marriage, and all that she may earn, save, or
inherit after her marriage, belongs to her
husband. He may squander her fortune at
the gaming-table, or among his mistresses; he
may bequeath it to his illegitimate children,
leaving his wife and her children to beggary;
he may do with it as he will; the law makes
him lord and gaoler, and places the poor
trembling victim unreservedly in his hands.
The like may he do with the earnings, the
savings of his wife, during his incarceration,
if he have committed a crime; during
his desertion, if he have taken a fancy to
desert her for some one else; during a
separation, forced on him by her friends, to
protect her from his brutality. "Whatever be
the cause which has thrown the wife on her
own resources, and made her work and gain,
he may swoop down like a bird of prey on
the earnings gained by her own work while
she was alone; he may seize them and carry
them off unhindered, leaving her to the same
terrible round of toil and spoliation, until
one or the other may die. That this is not
mere declamation, three authentic instances
of the exercise of such marital rights are
given in a certain admirable, wise, and witty
pamphlet* recently published: of which we
will say no more in the way of criticism than
that it is worthy of SYDNEY SMITH.

"A widow, with a small personal property

* Remarks upon the Law of Marriage and Divorce,
suggested by the Hon. Mrs. Norton's Letters to the
Queen. Ridgeway, Piccadilly.

and three young children, was induced, by a
scoundrel lurking under the garb of a
preacher, to marry him without a settlement.
He then threw off the mask, treated her and
her children most scandalously, and indulged
in the most disgraceful drunkenness and
debauchery. Still, his career was so short,
that when he sunk under his excesses, the
little property was not seriously impaired,
and the poor woman though again in a state
of pregnancy, was not in actual despair. In
a few days she was driven to madness when
she discovered that this man, shortly after
the marriage, had made a will, by which he
had bequeathed her little all to an illegitimate
child of his own."

A second case given, is that of a young
girl who married, somewhat against her
father's consent, a young man of indifferent
character. "Her father died suddenly without
having made a will or settlement of any
kind: and very shortly after, the husband in
a moment of drunken fury, committed a
felonious assault on his unhappy wife. He
was tried and convicted of the felony, and the
property of the wretched wife, which, upon
its descending to her, was instantly
transferred by the law to him, became forfeited
to the crown by reason of a felony of which
she was not the perpetrator, but the victim."

In the third case, the husband of a very
decent woman was convicted of a crime in
his own family too horrible to particularise.
He was sent to prison for three years.
The wife removed to a distant part of the
country, where, under an assumed name, she
supported herself and her children in
comfort, and was even enabled to save out of her
earnings. One evening her husband came
suddenly to the house, inflamed with drink,
and burning with evil passions. He came in
the name of the English law to claim his
marital rights over her person and her earnings,
to take his place in the family whose
virtue he had outraged, and whose safety he
had endangered. Convicted of such a
horrible crime as he had been, he was none the
less lord and master; the wife could none
the more obtain a release from him and his
vice. He was gaoler by right of English
law; and she was his prisoner by the fiat of
English bigotry.

But there is a difference in properties, the
personal and the real: the first belongs to
the husband, the second to the heir.

If a wife die without children, her houses
and lands pass to her next male heir; but if
she have a child, and that child be heard to
cry but once, and both mother and babe then
instantly expire, they belong to her husband
for life, under the not very intelligible title of
Tenant by the Courtesy of England Consummate.
Should the babe live, the gaoler-
marital is only Tenant by the Courtesy of
England Inchoate, and has to give up
possession on the boy's twenty-first birthday.
The sheep, oxen, Sèvres china, kid gloves,