principle that "lynching" cannot be authorized in a civilized country, and that the first lesson of orderly citizenship is that no man shall be judge, jury, and executioner in his own cause. But when a wife's offences are in question this salutary rule is overlooked, and men otherwise just-minded, refer cheerfully to the circonstance atténuante of the wife's drunkenness or bad language, as if it not only furnished an excuse for outrage upon her, but made it quite fit and proper for the Queen's peace to be broken and the woman's bones along with it.

This underlying public opinion is fortunately no new thing. On the contrary, it is an idea of immemorial antiquity which has been embodied in the laws of many nations, and notably, as derived from the old Roman Patria Potestas, in our own. It was only in 1829, in the 9th George IV., that the Act of Charles II., which embodied the old Common Law, and authorized a man "to chastise his wife with any reasonable instrument," was erased from our Statute-Book. Our position is not retrograde, but advancing, albeit too slowly. It is not as in the case of the Vivisection of Animals, that a new passion of cruelty is arising, but only that an old one, having its origin in the remotest epochs of barbarian wife-capture and polygamy, yet lingers in the dark places of the land. By degrees, if our statesmen will but bring the educational influence of law to bear upon the matter, it will surely die out and become a thing of the past, like cannibalism,-than which it is no better fitted for a Christian nation.

Of course the ideas of the suffering wives are cast in the same mould as those of their companions. They take it for granted that a Husband is a Beating Animal, and may be heard to remark when extraordinarily ill-treated by a stranger,-that they "never were so badly used, no not by their own 'usbands." Their wretched proverbial similarity to spaniels and walnut-trees, the readiness with which they sometimes turn round and snap at a bystander who has interfered on their behalf, of course affords to cowardly people a welcome excuse for the "policy of non-intervention," and forms the culminating proof of how far the iron of their fetters has eaten into their souls. A specially experienced gentleman writes from Liverpool: "The women of Lancashire are awfully fond of bad husbands. It has become quite a truism that our women are like dogs, the more you beat them the more they love you." Surely if a bruised and trampled woman be a pitiful object, a woman who has been brought down by fear, or by her own gross passions, so low as to fawn on the beast who strikes her, is one to make angels weep? *

* And there are gentlemen who think there is something beautiful in this! The Rev. F. W. Harper, writing to the Spectator of January 26, says, "I make bold to believe that if ever I should turn into a wife I shall choose to be beaten by my husband to any extent (short of being slain outright), rather than it should be said a stranger came between us." After thus bringing to our minds the beatings, and kickings, and blindings, and burnings, and "cloggings," which sicken us, he bids us remember that the true idea of marriage is "the relation of Christ to his Church"! It is not for me to speak on this subject, but I should have expected that a minister of the Christian religion would

To close this part of the subject, I conceive then, that the common idea of the inferiority of women, and the special notion of the rights of husbands, form the undercurrent of feeling which induces a man, when for any reason he is infuriated, to wreak his violence on his wife. She is, in his opinion, his natural souffre-douleur.

It remains to be noted what are the principal incitements to such outbursts of savage fury among the classes wherein Wife-beating prevails. They are not far to seek. The first is undoubtedly Drink-poisoned drink. The seas of brandy and gin, and the oceans of beer, imbibed annually in England, would be bad enough, if taken pure and simple,* but it is the vile adulterations introduced into them which make them the infuriating poisons which they are-which literally sting the wretched drinkers into cruelty, perhaps quite foreign to their natural temperaments. As an experienced minister in these districts writes to me, "I have known men almost as bad as those you quote (a dozen wife-murderers) made into most kind and considerate husbands by total abstinence." If the English people will go on swallowing millions' worth yearly of brain poison, what can we expect but brutality the most hideous and grotesque? Assuredly the makers and vendors of these devil's philtres are responsible for an amount of crime and ruin which some of the worst tyrants in history might have trembled to bear on their consciences; nor can the national legislature be absolved for suffering the great Drink interest thus foully to tamper with the health-nay, with the very souls of our countrymen. What is the occult influence which prevents the Excise from performing its duty as regards these frauds on the revenue?

2. Next to drunkenness as a cause of violence to women, follows the other "great sin of great cities," of which it is unnecessary here to speak. The storms of jealousy thence arising, the hideous alternative possession of the man by the twin demons of cruelty and lust-one of whom is never very far from the other-are familiar elements in the police-court tragedies.

3. Another source of the evil may be found in that terrible, though little recognized passion, which rude men and savages share with many animals, and which is the precise converse of sympathy, for it consists in anger and cruelty, excited by the signs of pain; an impulse to hurt and destroy any suffering creature, rather than to relieve or help it. Of the widespread influence of this passion (which I have ventured elsewhere to name Heteropathy), a passion only

have shuddered at the possibility of suggesting such a connection of ideas as these notions involve. Heaven help the poor women of Durham and Lancashire if their clergy lead them to picture a Christ resembling their husbands!

* I doubt that, even if reduced to bestial helplessness by these drinks in a pure state, men would ever be goaded by them to the class of passions excited by the adulterated ones. I have myself seen in Savoy whole crowds of men returning from market, all more or less tipsy from the free use of the excellent Vin de Seychelles, but instead of quarrelling or fighting, or beating their horses and pigs, their demeanour was ludicrously good-humoured and affectionate.

slowly dying out as civilization advances, there can, I think, be no doubt at all. It is a hideous mystery of human nature that such feelings should lie latent in it, and that cruelty should grow by what it feeds on; that the more the tyrant causes the victim to suffer the more he hates him, and desires to heap on him fresh sufferings. Among the lower classes the emotion of Heteropathy unmistakably finds vent in the cruelty of parents and step-parents to unfortunate children who happen to be weaker or more stupid than others, or to have been once excessively punished, and whose joyless little faces and timid crouching demeanour, instead of appeals for pity, prove provocations to fresh outrage. The group of his shivering and starving children and weeping wife is the sad sight which, greeting the eyes of the husband and father reeling home from the gin-shop, somehow kindles his fury. If the baby cry in the cradle, he stamps on it. If his wife wring her hands in despair, he fells her to the ground.*

4. After these I should be inclined to reckon, as a cause of brutal outbreaks, the impatience and irritation which must often be caused in the homes of the working classes by sheer friction. While rich people, when they get tired of each other or feel irritable, are enabled. to recover their tempers in the ample space afforded by a comfortable house, the poor are huddled together in such close quarters that the sweetest tempers and most tender affections must sometimes feel the trial. Many of us have shuddered at Miss Octavia Hill's all-too-graphic description of a hot, noisome court in the heart of London on a fine summer evening, with men, women, and children "pullulating," as the French say, on the steps, at the windows, on the pavement, all dirty, hot, and tired, and scarcely able to find standing or sitting room. It is true the poor are happily more gregarious than the rich. Paradoxical as it sounds, it takes a good deal of civilization to make a man love savage scenery, and a highly cultivated mind to find any "pleasure in the pathless woods" or "rapture in the lonely shore." Nevertheless, for moral health as much as for physical, a certain number of cubic inches of space are needed for every living being.

It is their interminable, inevitable propinquity which in the lower classes makes the nagging, wrangling, worrying women so intolerably trying. As millers get accustomed, it is said, to the clapping of their mill, so may some poor husbands become deaf to their wives' tongues; but the preliminary experience must be severe indeed.

These, then, are the incentives to Wife-beating and Wife-torture. What are the men on whom they exert their evil influence?

Obviously, by the hypothesis, they are chiefly the drunken, idle, ruffianly fellows who lounge about the public-houses instead of working for their families. Without pretending to affirm that there are no sober, industrious husbands goaded to strike their wives through

* Hopes of the Human Race, p. 172 (The Evolution of the Social Sentiment). By Frances Power Cobbe. Williams and Norgate.

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jealousy or irritation, the presumption is enormous against the character of any man convicted of such an assault. The cases in which the police reports of them add, "He had been bound over to keep the peace several times previously," or "He had been often fined for drunkenness and disorderly behaviour," are quite countless. Sometimes it approaches the ludicrous to read how helplessly the law has been attempting to deal with the scoundrel, as, for example, in the case of William Owen, whom his wife said she "met for the first time beside Ned Wright's Bible-barrow," and who told the poor fool he had been "converted." He was known to Constable 47 K as having been convicted over sixty times for drunkenness and violent assaults; and the moment he left the church he began to abuse his wife.

The pitilessness and ferocity of these men sometimes looks like madness. Alfred Stone, for example, coming home in a bad temper, took his wife's parrot out of its cage, stamped on it, and threw it on the fire, observing, "Jane! it is the last thing you have got belonging to your father!" In the hands of such a man a woman's heart must be crushed, like the poor bird under his heel.

Turn we now from the beaters to the beaten. I have already said that we must not idealize the women of the "kicking districts." They are, mostly, poor souls, very coarse, very unwomanly. Some of them drink whenever they can procure drink. Some are bad and cruel mothers (we cannot forget the awful stories of the Burial Clubs); many are hopelessly depraved, and lead as loose lives as their male companions. Many keep their houses in a miserable state of dirt and disorder, neglect their children, and sell their clothes and furniture for gin. Not seldom will one of these reckless creatures pursue her husband in the streets with screams of abuse and jeers. The man knows not where to turn to escape from the fury. When he comes home at night, he probably finds her lying dead drunk on the bed, and his children crying for their supper. Again, in a lesser degree, women make their homes into purgatories by their bad tempers. There was in old times a creature recognized by law as a "Common Scold," for whom the punishment of ducking in the village horse-pond was formally provided. It is to be feared her species is by no means to be reckoned among the "Extinct Mammalia." Then comes the "nagging" wife, immortalized as "Mrs. Caudle;" the worrying, peevish kill-joy, whose presence is a wet blanket-nay, a wet blanket stuck full of pins; the argumentative woman, with a voice like a file and a face like a ferret, who bores on, night and day, till life is a burden.*

I have seen a woman like this tormenting a great, good-natured hobbledehoy, who unhappily belonged to Carlyle's order of "Inarticulate ones," and found it impossible to avoid being caught every five minutes in the Socratic elenchus, which she set for him like a trap whenever he opened his mouth. At length when this had lasted the larger part of a rainy day, the poor boy who had seemed for some time on the verge of explosion, suddenly sprang from his chair, seized the little woman firmly though gently round the waist, carried her out into the hall, and came back to his seat, making no remark on the transaction. Who could blame him?

These are terrible harpies. But it is scarcely fair to assume that every woman who is accused of "nagging" necessarily belongs to their order. I have no doubt that every husband who comes home with empty pockets, and from whom his wife needs to beg repeatedly for money to feed herself and her children, considers that she "nags" him. I have no doubt that when a wife reproaches such a husband with squandering his wages in the public-house, or on some wretched rival, while she and her children are starving, he accuses her to all his friends of intolerable "nagging," and that, not seldom having acquired from him the reputation of this kind of thing, the verdict of "Serve her Right" is generally passed upon her by public opinion when her "nagging" is capitally punished by a broken head.

But all women of the humblest class are not those terrible creatures, drunken, depraved, or ill-tempered; or even addicted to "nagging.'" On the contrary, I can affirm from my own experience, as well, I believe,. as that of all who have had much to do with the poor of great cities, there are among them at least as many good women as bad -as many who are sober, honest, chaste, and industrious, as are the contrary. There is a type which every clergyman, and magistrate, and district visitor will recognize in a moment as very common: a woman generally small and slight of person, but alert, intelligent, active morning, noon, and night, doing the best her strength allows to keep her home tidy, and her children neat and well fed, and to supply her husband's wants. Her face was, perhaps, pretty at eighteen by the time she is eight-and-twenty, toil and drudgery and many children have reduced her to a mere rag, and only her eyes retain a little pathetic relic of beauty. This woman expresses herself well and simply it is a special "note" of her character that she uses no violent words, even in describing the worst injuries. There is nothing "loud" about her in voice, dress, or manners. She is emphatically a "decent,” respectable woman. Her only fault, if fault it be, is that she will insist on obtaining food and clothing for her children, and that when she is refused them she becomes that depressed, broken-spirited creature whose mute, reproachful looks act as a goad, as I have said, to the passions of her oppressor. We shall see presently what part this class of woman plays in the horrible domestic tragedies of England.

We have now glanced at the conditions under which Wife-beating takes place, at the incentives immediately leading to it, the men who beat, and the women who are beaten. Turn we now to examine more closely the thing itself.

There are two kinds of Wife-beating which I am anxious the reader should keep clearly apart in his mind. There is what may be called Wife-beating by Combat, and there is Wife-beating properly so called, which is only wife, and not wife-and-husband beating. In the first, both parties have an equal share. Bad words are exchanged, then blows. The man hits, the woman perhaps scratches and tears. If