notwithstanding anything to the contrary in past statutes, no woman henceforth shall by marriage change her legal status or lose any part of her rights over property. Marriage settlements will then give to husband or wife whatever rights are thought reasonable by the contracting parties.

even over men.

Fashion has still tyrannical power, not over women only, but When the great "beard-movement" commenced, it was ludicrous to see how many men wished to join it, but did not dare, for fear of being singular. For more than two years there was suspense, and it almost seemed to be a failure, through the strong opposition of influential persons at the head of great establishments: then in one half-year the new idea suddenly triumphed; and huge beards, huge mustachios became quite a national feature in all the cities. So too may it be in the matter of marriage. If ever that come about (which we heartily deprecate, and desire to avert by the establishment of justice), but, if ever Englishwomen do rebel against the marriage law, it may begin with some martyr-spirited heroine, perhaps some accomplished and graceful lady; who will no more quail from male or female reproof, than Dr Mary Walker or Dr Elizabeth Blackwell; and just when men begin to think it is all nonsense and moonshine, they may find women of the working classes by the hundred and the thousand following the example,-sheltering themselves from reproof by their own numbers. It is to obviate this result, that we implore all true and genuine Conservatives not to delay and use half measures, but to do justice to the sex in good time. He who tries to uphold injustice is the true and efficient revolutionist, while he thinks he is Conservative.

But, not only in regard to property, also in regard to children, the law is unjust to women. The mother has to undergo much in bringing a child to maturity; next the agony of childbirth, the exhaustion of suckling, the countless cares of tending and watching, by night and by day. The child becomes the darling of her heart, the image of her dreams, a great centre of her thoughts and hopes; and after all her toils, the law permits a husband to take the child permanently out of her sight, and (if he choose) to put it under the charge of an enemy, perhaps under that of a rival, his concubine, who will fill its mind with falsehoods and teach it to hate and despise its mother. Such things are not possibilities merely and dreams; they are stern realities; and the law gives her no redress. All who are in middle life remember what happened, when a prime minister was prosecuted

for adultery. The facts are so public, that it avails not to suppress names. Lord Melbourne, an elderly gentleman of [high accomplishments, was fond of the company of a very intelligent lady, the Hon. Mrs Norton, young enough perhaps to be his daughter. Mr Norton became jealous, having been worked upon (as some said) by Tory politicians; an explanation which received plausibility from the indecent and inhuman triumph of certain Tory journals, as soon as it was announced that Mr Norton had called the prime minister into court as an adulterer. The jury acquitted Lord Melbourne. Was not then Mrs Norton's reputation left unstained? Not wholly. For the hostile counsel had inveighed maliciously on certain ambiguous facts, which ought to have been explained and were not. Mrs Norton asked leave to explain them, and was not permitted, because she was not a party to the suit! It was a question (forsooth) between the two men only: she had no business with it! Mr Norton, having tried to fix on his wife this dreadful stigma, and failed, did not love her the more for it, and apparently hated her. Having ejected her from his house, he refused to allow her to see her children. She pleaded for leave to see them only once in six months, and in the presence of a person appointed by her husband; this was refused her. She brought the question into court, but in vain her husband's inexorable refusal was pronounced legal. The matter was treated in the House of Lords,-and no wonder, since the prime minister and a lady with the title Honourable were concerned,-and an eccentric legal peer* of vast powers and experience expatiated on the injustice with which Mrs Norton was treated. But after a vehement speech all on that side, he wound up by saying, that our law is so consistently and monstrously unjust to women, that it is not worth while to give a fraction of justice in one particular case he therefore gave his voice against her. We claim that men with a better heart than that peer will do to women the justice about which he prated.

In the matter of children, when the quarrel of parents is severe, some compromise is evidently needed. In no two cases would the same compromise be the best. Sometimes the mother might have the control until the age of fourteen, and the father after that age but the compromise should in each case be settled, under the guidance of general principles, by an impartial A divorce which stigmatised one parent would ordinarily withdraw the children from that parent's control; as, when

court.

:

* Lord Brougham, ex-Chancellor, once known as Henry Brougham.

drunkenness or felony occasioned divorce. It does not belong to these pages to define what ought to be enacted, but to protest against the extreme and obvious injustice of the existing law. Since the Divorce Court has been established, such an injustice as refusing, to a lady whose reputation was at stake, leave to explain what was obscure (we believe) would not be allowed: but English law has much yet to do, before it can pretend that this injustice is a thing of past days.

It is not necessary here fully to open, what is meant by saying that "a man's claims over his wife's person (now justified by the law) are extreme and monstrous." It suffices to press, that our judges still maintain, that a man has a right to lock his wife up, if he fears she will run away from him; and that, at no distant time, judges pronounced that he might chastise her moderately with a moderately thick stick. Recent judges have overruled this, without any new legislation. Such things give a painful idea of the uncertainty, as well as injustice of our law. Until the marriage laws are made more just, it is morally impossible to carry out legal severity against those who set them at naught, even when the result is profligacy most pernicious and most dangerous to the State. As our rugged climate and the toil needed to supply our more elaborate wants of body and mind, put a vast chasm between our condition and that of the Polynesian savages; so the frightful pestilence, which in our constitutions is generated by profligacy, becomes an additional and overwhelming necessity for State interference against moral corruptions. The topic can here be only alluded to, not dilated on. But inasmuch as no pestilence will confine itself to that class of the community in whose filth or vice it springs up; neither will this pestilence, if allowed to be unchecked, spare the innocent, but will spread its miseries further and wider still. The necessity of checking such a flood of evil is a new argument for divesting honourable marriage of every gratuitous burden and every injustice.

ON STATE PROVISION FOR VICE, BY WARRANTING

IMPUNITY.

First Part of the Tract of 1869, reprinted.

"Make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof." Paul to Romans xiii. 14.

NDER the name of the Great Social Evil, our newspapers

UNDE

have for years alluded to an awful vice, too evidently of wide prevalence. Private effort is powerless to prevent: it can but, too late, rescue a few frail victims. Charitable persons, though well aware how much better it is to tear up roots of evil than to lop twigs, yet have no other form of action, but to slave at a task which is comparable to mopping out the ocean.

But at length the State itself has been forced out of its apathy; the State, which can not only punish those primarily guilty, but act through institutions upon men's habits, morals, and circumstances. Being largely able to prevent, and being itself vitally dependent on the public morality, it is bound to prevent; and is still more solemnly bound not to facilitate, to occasion, to sanction vice, or intensify depravity. Dr Gourley, a veteran physician, long acquainted with the army, was peculiarly shocked at the "rottenness" (such is the word) of our most splendid regiments in the Crimean war; and for a series of years made energetic representations concerning the unsound health of English soldiers. Sir Alexander Tulloch and other distinguished persons entirely agreed in Dr Gourley's judgment, which declared the evil to have removable causes. In a paper read at Bradford to the Social Science Association Dr Gourley recited the leading facts. 1. The soldier is entrapped into the army by making him drunk: 2. he is kept in artificial idleness, as a pampered male animal, in wretched ennui for eight hours a day: 3. he has the drinkshop near to him. Dr Gourley was too tender to add, what is

* Nevertheless, others maintain that the only "rottenness" was either from unwholesome barracks, or from "drink;" and that, though the drink generally led to another vice, it was not the latter which incapacitated the soldier.

now loudly asserted, that superior military authorities regard it as a natural right of the soldiers to have loose women hanging about the barracks or camp. Be this as it may, Parliament in 1866 took the matter up with silent unanimity, and passed a vigorous Act, entitled The Contagious Diseases Act,-Diseases, in the plural! Who could guess that this meant one shameful disease? The public, both then and later, supposed it to refer to the Cattle Murrain.

And of what sort was the Act? It had not a scrap of prevention in it. It did not remove one of the incentives to vice, nor one of the facilities. It dealt with effects, not causes. It did not regard the vice as an evil, but only the disease engendered by it. It is evidently based upon the axiom, enunciated deliberately by an eminent Colonial Governor, "Prostitution is a public necessity;" which is practically interpreted, that the trade is a fixed quantity, against which it is vain to struggle: that, on the contrary, we must acquiesce in it, accept it as an English institution, and try to make it as safe to health and as decorous as may be.

But that is not all. So eager were its authors and advocates to make the indulgence of foul lust safe and comfortable, that they unhesitatingly broke down all the legal safeguards of honour which are the birthright of chaste Englishwomen. If the right of jury trial were suddenly withdrawn from the men of Hampshire or Devonshire, insurrection might be expected, and certainly would be justified, if successful. The jury is the oldest and most sacred safeguard of English liberties. Far older than Parliaments, it grew out of the oldest Saxon rights. Surely it is among the earliest and most essential duties of Parliament to guard for the nation, against the invasion of the Executive, those tribunals which protect innocence. But against women, and women alone-(from whom no insurrection is feared)-French despotism has been brought in over large areas of the country, and under pretences pregnant with despotism to men as well as women. We have lived all our lives under the belief that no square yard of Queen Victoria's realms is under martial law, but only those men who have by their own act submitted to it. But now, if the Queen's servants quarter her soldiers in some town, the place is called a "garrison town," and under cover of this word it is pretended that the civil population of that town becomes a military population. All the men, as well as the women, may suddenly find themselves under martial law, unless the principle be indignantly rejected, and the Act embodying it repealed.