the woman generally gets much the worst of it, it is simply because cats are weaker than dogs. The man cannot so justly be said to have "beaten" his wife as to have vanquished her in a boxingmatch. Almost without exception in these cases it is mentioned that "both parties were the worse for liquor." It is in this way the drunken woman is beaten, by the drunken man, not by the ideal sober and industrious husband, who has a right to be disgusted by her intoxication. It is nearly exclusively, I think, in such drunken quarrels that the hateful virago gets beaten at all. As a general rule she commands too much fear, and is so ready to give back curse for curse and blow for blow, that, in cold blood, nobody meddles with her. Such a termagant is often the tyrant of her husband, nay, of the whole court or lane in which she lives; and the sentiments she excites are the reverse of those which bring down the fist and the clogs of the ruffian husband on the timid and meek-faced woman who tries, too often unsuccessfully, the supposed magic of a soft answer to turn away the wrath of such a wild beast as he. One word, however, must be said, before we leave this revolting picture, even for that universally condemned creature, the drunken wife. Does any save one, the Great Judge above, ever count how many of such doubly-degraded beings have been driven to intemperance by sheer misery? How many have been lured to drink by companionship with their drunken husbands? How many have sunk into the habit because, worn out in body by toil and child-bearing, degraded in soul by contempt and abuse, they have not left in them one spark of that self-respect which enables a human being to resist the temptation to drown care and remembrance in the dread forgetfulness of strong drink? The second kind of Wife-beating is when the man alone is the striker and the woman the stricken. These are the cases which specially challenge our attention, and for which it may be hoped some palliative may be found. In these, the husband usually comes. home "the worse for.liquor," and commences, sometimes without any provocation at all, to attack his wife, or drag her out of the bed. where she is asleep, or has just been confined. (See cases p. 74.) Sometimes there is preliminary altercation, the wife imploring him to give her some money to buy necessaries, or reproaching him for drinking all he has earned. In either case the wife is passive so far as blows are concerned, unless at the last, in self-defence, she lays her hand on some weapon to protect her life-a fact which is always cited against her as a terrible delinquency.* Such was the case of Susannah Palmer, a few years ago, whose husband had beaten her, and sold up her furniture again and again, blackened her eyes, and knocked out her five front teeth. At last on one occasion, with the knife with which she was cutting her children's supper, she somehow inflicted a slight cut on the man while he was knocking her about the head. He immediately summoned her for "cutting and wounding him," Such are the two orders of Wife-beating with which a tolerably extensive study of the subject has made me familiar. It will be observed that neither includes that ideal Wife-beater of whom we hear so much, the sober, industrious man goaded to frenzy by his wife's temper or drunkenness. I will not venture to affirm that that Ideal Wife-beater is as mythical as the griffin or the sphinx, but I will affirm that in all my inquiries I have never yet come on his track. I have insisted much on this point, because I think it has been strangely overlooked, and that it ought to form a most important factor in making up our judgment of the whole matter and of the proper remedies. It will be found, I believe, on inquiry that it is actually surprising how very seldom there is anything at all alleged by the husband against the wife in the worst cases of wife-tortureexcept the "provocation" and "nagging" of asking him for money; or, as in the case of poor Ellen Harlow, of refusing him twopence out of her own earnings when he had been drinking all day and she had been working. In thirty-eight cases taken at random, five were of the class of drunken combats; and in thirty nothing was reported as alleged a gainst the victims. In many cases strong testimony was given of their good conduct and industry: e.g. the wife of William White, who was burnt to death by the help of his paraffin lamp, was a "hard-working industrious woman." The wife of James Lawrence, whose face bore in court tokens of the most dreadful violence, "said that her husband had for years done nothing for his livelihood, while she had bought a shop, and stocked it out of her own earnings." The wife of Richard Mountain had "supported herself and her children." The wife of Alfred Etherington, who has been dangerously injured by her husband kicking and jumping on her, had been supporting him and their children. The wife of James Styles, who was beaten by her husband till she became insensible, had long provided for him and herself by charwork; and so on. Regarding the extent of the evil it is difficult to arrive at a just calculation. Speaking of those cases only which come before the courts,-probably, of course, not a third of the whole number,-the elements for forming an opinion are the following: In the Judicial Statistics for England and Wales, issued in 1877 for 1876, we find that of Aggravated Assaults on Women and Children, of the class which since 1853 have been brought under Summary Jurisdiction there were reported, and she was sent to Newgate. I found her there, and afterwards received the very best possible character of her from several respectable tradespeople in whose houses she had worked as a charwoman for years. Friends subscribed to help her, and the admirable chaplain of Newgate interested himself warmly in her case and placed her in safety. This, however, was a "provocation" on which a Chester jury founded a recommendation to mercy when they found him guilty of manslaughter. See p. 75. How many of these were assaults made by husbands on wives there is no means of distinguishing, but, judging from other sources," I should imagine they formed about four-fifths of the whole. Among the worst cases, when the accused persons were committed for trial or bailed for appearance at Assizes or Sessions (coming under the head of Criminal Proceedings), the classification adopted in the Parliamentary Return does not permit of identifying the cases which concerned women only. Some rough guess on the matter may perhaps be formed from the preponderance of male criminals in all classes of violent crime. Out of 67 persons charged with Murder in 1876, 49 were men. Of 41 charged with Attempt to Murder, 35 were males. Of 157 charged with Shooting, Stabbing, &c., 146 were men. Of 232 charged with Manslaughter, 185 were men; and of 1,020 charged with Assault inflicting bodily harm, 857 were men. In short, out of 1,517 persons charged with crimes of cruelty and violence, more than five-sixths were males, and only 235 females. Of course the men's offences include a variety of crimes besides Wife-beating and Wifetorture. The details of the crimes for which twenty-two men who were capitally convicted in 1876 suffered death are noteworthy on this head. (Criminal Statistics p. xxix.) Of these: Edward Deacon, shoemaker, murdered his wife by cutting her head with a chopper. John Thomas Green, painter, shot his wife with a pistol. Henry Webster, labourer, murdered his wife by cutting her throat. Beside these, five others murdered women with whom they were living in vicious relations, and three others (including the monster William Fish) murdered children. In all, more than half the convicted persons executed that year were guilty of wife-murder,-or of what we may term quasi-wife-murder. A source of more accurate information is to be found in the abstracts of the Reports of Chief Constables for the years 1870-1-2-3-4, presented to the Home Secretary, and published in the "Report on Brutal Assaults" (p. 169, et seq.). In this instructive table Brutal Assaults on Women are discriminated from those on men, and the total number of convictions for such assaults for the whole five years is 6,029; or at the average of 1,205 per annum. This is, E.g. the Report of the Society for the Protection of Women and Children, which has this significant passage: "Some of the cases of assaults were of a brutal and aggravated character, thirty-three by husbands on wives, five by fathers, and four by mothers on their children." however, obviously an imperfect return. In Nottinghamshire, where such offences were notoriously common, the doings of the "Lambs" have somehow escaped enumeration. "The Chief Constable states that he is unable to furnish a correct return." From Merionethshire no report was received in reply to the Home Office Circular; and from Rutland, Salop, Radnor, and Cardiganshire, the Chief Constables returned the reply that there were no brutal assaults in those counties during the five years in question, a statement suggesting that some different classification of offences must prevail in those localities, since the immunity of Cardiganshire and Salop for five years from such crimes of violence would be little short of miraculous, while Flint alone had sixteen convictions. Thus I conceive that we may fairly estimate the number of brutal assaults (brutal be it remembered, not ordinary) committed on women in England and Wales and actually brought to justice at about 1,500 a year, or more than four per diem; and of these the great majority are of husbands on wives. Let us now proceed from the number to the nature of the offences in question. I have called this paper English Wife-torture because I wish to impress my readers with the fact that the familiar term "wifebeating" conveys about as remote a notion of the extremity of the cruelty indicated as when candid and ingenuous vivisectors talk of "scratching a newt's tail" when they refer to burning alive, or dissecting out the nerves of living dogs, or torturing ninety cats in one series of experiments. Wife-beating is the mere preliminary canter before the race,—the preface to the serious matter which is to follow. Sometimes, it is true, there are men of comparatively mild dispositions who are content to go on beating their wives year after year, giving them occasional black-eyes and bruises, or tearing out a few locks of their hair and spitting in their faces, or bestowing an ugly print of their iron fingers on the woman's soft arm, but not proceeding beyond these minor injuries to anything perilous. Among the lower classes, unhappily, this rude treatment is understood to mean very little more than that the man uses his weapon-the fists-as the woman uses hers-the tongue -and neither are very much hurt or offended by what is either done by one or said by the other. The whole state of manners is what is to be deplored, and our hope must be to change the bear-garden into the semblance of a civilized community, rather than by any direct effort to correct the special offence. Foul words, gross acts, drink, dirt, and vice, oaths, curses, and blows, it is all, alas! in keeping—nor can we hope to cure one evil without the rest. But the unendurable mischief, the discovery of which has driven me to try to call public attention to the whole matter, is this-Wife-beating in process of time, and in numberless cases, advances to Wife-torture, and the Wife-torture usually ends in Wife-maiming, Wife-blinding, or Wife-murder. A man who has "thrashed " his wife with his fists half-a-dozen times, becomes satiated with such enjoyment as that performance brings, and next time he is angry he kicks her with his hob-nailed shoes. When he has kicked her a few times standing or sitting, he kicks her down and stamps on her stomach, her breast, or her face. If he does not wear clogs or hob-nailed shoes, he takes up some other weapon, a knife, a poker, a hammer, a bottle of vitriol, or a lighted lamp, and strikes her with it, or sets her on fire;—and then, and then only, the hapless creature's sufferings are at an end. I desire specially to avoid making this paper more painful than can be helped, but it is indispensable that some specimens of the tortures to which I refer should be brought before the reader's eye. I shall take them exclusively from cases reported during the last three or four months. Were I to go further back for a year or two, it would be easy to find some more "sensational," as, for example, of Michael Copeland, who threw his wife on a blazing fire; of George Ellis, who murdered his wife by pitching her out of window; of Ashton Keefe, who beat his wife and thrust a box of lighted matches into his little daughter's breast when she was too slow in bringing his beer; and of Charles Bradley, who, according to the report in the Manchester Examiner, “came home, and after locking the door, told his wife he would murder her. He immediately set a large bulldog at her, and the dog, after flying at the upper part of her body, seized hold of the woman's right arm, which she lifted to protect herself, and tore pieces out. The prisoner in the meantime kept striking her in the face, and inciting the brute to worry her. The dog dragged her up and down, biting pieces out of her arms, and the prisoner then got on the sofa and hit and kicked her on the breast." But the instances of the last three or four months-from September to the end of January-are more than enough to establish all I want to prove; and I beg here to return my thanks for a collection of them, and for many very useful observations and tabulations of them, to Miss A. Shore, who has been good enough to place them at my disposal. It is needful to bear in mind in reading them, that the reports of such cases which appear in newspapers are by no means always reliable, or calculated to convey the same impressions as the sight of the actual trial. In some of the following instances, also, I have only been able to obtain the first announcement of the offence, without means of checking it by the subsequent proceedings in court. Per contra, it should be remembered that if a few of these cases may possibly have been exaggerated or trumped up (as I believe the story of the man pouring Chili vinegar into his wife's eyes proved to have been), there are, for every one of these published horrors, at least three or four which never are reported at all, and where the poor victim dies |