lence is not sufficiently stringent" (p. 5), and Mr. Justice Lush, Mr. Justice Mellor, Lord Chief Baron Kelly, Baron Bramwell, Baron Pigott, and Baron Pollock, express the same judgment in almost the same words (pp. 7-19).

Several of these, and also other judges, who do not directly say that they consider the present law insufficient, manifest their opinion that it is so by recommending that (under various safeguards) the penalty of flogging be added thereto. The agreement of opinion of these great authorities on this point appears (to the uninitiated) as if it must have been sufficient to carry with it any measure which had such weighty recommendation.

The following are the opinions in favour of flogging offenders in cases of brutal assaults :

Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, Mr. Justice Blackburn, Mr. Justice Mellor, Mr. Justice Lush, Mr. Justice Quain, Mr. Justice Archibald, Mr. Justice Brett, Mr. Justice Grove, Lord Chief Baron Kelly, Baron Bramwell, Baron Pigott, Baron Pollock, Baron Cleasby, and Baron Amphlett. The opinions of Lord Coleridge and Mr. Justice Denman were hesitating, and the only decided opponent of flogging at that time on the judicial bench in England was Mr. Justice Keating.

The Chairmen of Quarter Sessions and magistrates in Sessions were in sixty-four cases out of the sixty-eight from whence responses came to the Home Office, in favour of flogging:-Leftwich, Oxford (county), Stafford (county), and the North Riding being the only exceptions.

The Recorders of forty-one towns were likewise in favour of flogging, and only those of Lincoln, Nottingham, and Wolverhampton were opposed to it. The Recorders of Folkestone and of Newcastleon-Tyne added the recommendation that a husband who had been flogged for a brutal assault on his wife should be divorced from her.

On reading this summary it will doubtless to many persons appear inexplicable that three years should have elapsed since so important a testimony was collected at the public expense, and at the trouble of so many eminent gentlemen whose time was of infinite value; and that, so far as can be ascertained, absolutely nothing has been done in the way of making practical use of it. During the interval scores of Bills, on every sort and kind of question interesting to the represented sex, have passed through Parliament; but this question, on which the lives of women literally hang, has never been even mooted since Lord Beaconsfield so complacently assured its solitary champion that "Her Majesty's Government would bear in mind the evident feeling of the House on the subject." Something like 6,000 women, judging by the judicial statistics, have been in the intervening years "brutally assaulted"—that is, maimed, blinded, trampled, burned, and in no inconsiderable number of instances murdered outright-and several thousand children have been brought up to witness scenes which might, as Colonel Leigh said, "infernalize a whole generation." Never

theless, the newspapers go on boasting of elementary education, and Parliament busies itself in its celebrated elephant's trunk fashion, alternately rending oaks and picking up sixpences; but this evil remains untouched!

The fault does not lie with the Home Office-scarcely even with Parliament, except so far as Parliament persists in refusing to half the nation those political rights which alone can, under our present order of things, secure attention to any claims. We live in these days under Government by Pressure, and the Home Office must attend first to the claims which are backed by political pressure; and Members of Parliament must attend to the subjects pressed by their constituents; and the claims and subjects which are not supported by such political pressure must go to the wall.

Nevertheless, when we women of the upper ranks,-constitutionally qualified by the possession of property (and, I may be permitted to add, naturally qualified by education and intelligence at least up to the level of those of the "illiterate" order of voters), to exercise through the suffrage that pressure on Parliament,—are refused that privilege, and told year after year by smiling senators that we have no need whatever for it, that we form no "class," and that we may absolutely and always rely on men to prove the deepest and tenderest concern for everything which concerns the welfare of women, shall we not point to these long-neglected wrongs of our trampled sisters, and denounce that boast of the equal concern of men for women as— a falsehood?

Were women to obtain the franchise to-morrow, it is morally certain that a Bill for the Protection of Wives would pass through the legislature before a Session was over. I have yet hopes that even before that event takes place, some attention may be directed to the miserable subject, and that it may be possible to obtain some measure, holding out a prospect of relief to the wretched victims-if not of repression of the crime of Wife-torture. What measure ought we to ask for the purpose?

Of the desirability that any step should be taken in the direction of inflicting the lash for aggravated assaults on women, I shall not presume in the face of such authorities as have been cited above, to offer any opinion whatever.

One thing is manifest at all events. It is, that if flogging were added to the present penalties of wife-beating, the great difficulty which meets all efforts to stop the practice would be doubled. That difficulty is the inducing of the women (whose evidence is in most instances indispensable) to bear testimony against their husbands. It is hard enough to lead them to do so when the results will be an imprisonment to end in one month or in six, after which the husband will return to them full of fresh and more vindictive cruelty, and when in short, bringing him "up" means abandoning the last ray of hope of ever

making a happy home. This sentiment, half prudence, half perhaps in some cases lingering affection, cannot be overcome (even were it desirable to do so), as the law now stands, and causes endless failures of justice and perplexity to the always well-meaning magistrates. As a general rule it is said the wives will often tell their stories to the constables at the moment of the arrest, and can frequently be induced to attend in court the day or two after their injuries and while still smarting from their blows, and kicks, and "cloggings." But if a week be allowed to elapse, still more if the case be referred to the Quarter Sessions or Assizes, the wife is almost certain in the interval to have relented, or to have learned to dread the consequence of bearing testimony, and, instead of telling her true story, is constantly found to narrate some poor little fable, whereby the husband is quite exonerated, and, perhaps the blame taken on herself, as in the pitifully ludicrous case cited by Colonel Egerton Leigh in the House of Commons-of the woman who appeared without a nose, and told the magistrate she had bitten it off herself! On this subject, and on the defects of our whole procedure in such cases, some just remarks were made by Mr. Serjeant Pulling in a paper read before the Social Science Congress at Liverpool, published in the Transactions for 1876, p. 345. He says—

"No one who has gained experience of wife-beating cases, can doubt that our present system of procedure seems as if it were designed not to repress crime, but to discourage complaints. A woman after being brutally assaulted by her husband, and receiving a sufficient number of kicks and blows to make her think she is being murdered, calls out for the aid of the police; and if her statements were there and then authentically recorded, and afterwards, on the commitment and trial of the aggressor, allowed to form part of the formal proof against him (subject of course to the right of the accused to refute it by cross-examination), there can be little doubt that the ends of justice would oftener be attained. In practice, however, the course is for the police to hear the loose statements of the scared victim and bystanders; and the subsequent proceedings are left very much to depend on the influences brought to bear on the poor wife in 'the interim (before the trial). She may relent before morning comes, or be subjected to so much sinister influence on the part of the husband and his friends as to be effectually prevented from disclosing the whole truth at all; or if doing so in the first stage of the proceedings she may be easily made so completely to neutralize its effect, that conviction becomes impracticable. The lesson taught to the ruffian is that if he ill-uses his dog or his donkey he stands a fair chance of being duly prosecuted, convicted, and punished; but that if the ill-usage is merely practised on his wife, the odds are in favour of his own entire immunity, and of his victim getting worse treatment if she dare appear against him."

To avoid these failures of justice, and the consequent triumph of the callous offenders, magistrates are generally very anxious to have these cases summarily disposed of, and to strike while the iron is hot. But of course there hence arises another evil, namely, that the greater offences, which ought to be tried in the higher courts, and were intended to receive the heaviest penalty which the law allows, are punished only to the extent of the powers of the summary jurisdiction,

of which the maximum is six months' imprisonment. Occasionally there is reason to believe the magistrates mend matters a little by the not unfair device of ordering the offender to find security for good behaviour, which, as he is generally unable to discover anybody foolish enough to give it for him, involves his incarceration in jail, possibly for a year. And, again, magistrates kindly endeavour to make the period of detention serve the process of reclaiming the man to better feelings about his wife, by allowing her entreaty to weigh importantly in any application to curtail his sentence, and letting him know that any repetition of offence will be closely watched and doubly severely punished.* But all these humane devices, though sometimes, it is to be hoped, successful, yet leave the mournful fact patent to observation that the existing law, even worked with the extremest care and kindness, cannot and does not prevent the repetition, year after year, of all the frightful cruelties, beatings, burnings, cloggings, and tramplings of which we have given some pages back a few awful samples.

The relief which I most earnestly desire to see extended to these women, and from which I would confidently hope for some alleviation of their wretched condition, though its entire cure is beyond hope, is of a very different sort. It is this. A Bill should, I think, be passed, affording to these poor women, by means easily within their reach, the same redress which women of the richer classes obtain through the Divorce Court. They should be enabled to obtain from the Court which sentences their husbands a Protection Order, which should in their case have the same validity as a judicial separation. In addition to this, the Custody of the Children should be given to the wife, and an order should be made for the husband to pay to the wife such weekly sum for her own and her children's maintenance as the Court may see fit.

The following are the chief clauses in a Bill, which has been prepared by Alfred D. Hill, Esq., J.P., of Birmingham, and the principle of which has been approved by many eminent legal authorities :

BILL

Intituled An Act for the Protection of Wives whose Husbands have been convicted of assaults upon them.

Whereas it is desirable to make provision for the protection of wives whose

I have before me a letter written by a man under these circumstances from Clerkenwell House of Detention to his wife. The writer (who was sent to jail for beating the aforesaid poor woman very cruelly) is wonderfully civil, and even condescends to coax. He regrets that it is long since he heard from her, but adds, "I hope you will not forget to try and get me out. If you will go to the magistrate, Mr. *, i mean, it is very likely you can get my time reduced. I hope you will do all you can for me. I have quiet (sic) made up my mind to do what is right to everybody, more especially to you. I hope you will not be angery with me writing. I do hope and pray that you will do all you can for me. So good-bye, hopeing to see and hear from you soon, and with your kind assistance to soon be out. So no more at present from your poor Petitioner, The intelligent reader will perceive that there is not a single word of regret for his cruelty in this epistle. Still it is a good point when the tyrant can be brought thus to sue his victim. All honour to the wise and kindly magistrate who brought it about.

husbands have been convicted of assaults upon them: Be it enacted by the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and of the Commons in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:

1. In any case where a husband has been convicted summarily or otherwise of an assault upon his wife, and has been sentenced to imprisonment therefor without the option of a fine in lieu of such imprisonment, it shall be competent for the Court by which such sentence has been pronounced, either at the time of such conviction or at any time afterwards, upon proof thereof, to make an give to the wife upon her application an order protecting her earnings and property acquired since the date of such order from her husband and all creditors and persons claiming under him; and such earnings and property shall belong to the wife as if she were a feme sole; and if any such order of protection be made, the wife shall, during the continuance thereof, be and be deemed to be in the like position in all respects with regard to property and contracts, and suing and being sued, as she would be if she had obtained a decree of judicial separation from the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes.

2. The police magistrate or justices shall include in such order as aforesaid an injunction restraining the husband from going to or visiting the wife without her consent; and if any husband against whom any such injunction shall be made shall commit any act of disobedience thereto, such act shall be deemed to be a misdemeanour, upon due proof of which any Court which would have been competent to make such order and injunction may commit him to the common gaol or house of correction of the city, borough, or county within the jurisdiction of such Court for any period not exceeding three months with or without hard labour.

3. And any Court which would have been competent to make such order as aforesaid may further include in such order a provision that the wife shall have the legal custody of the children of her husband and herself. And the same Court which would have been competent to make such order may further include in such order a provision directing that the husband shall pay to the wife a weekly sum not exceeding shillings per week for the maintenance of herself and of such children, which provisions of the order shall, if the payments required by it be in arrear, be enforced in the manner prescribed by the Act of the 11th and 12th Vict. c. 43, for the enforcing of orders of justices requiring the payment of a sum of money.

4. Every such order as aforesaid shall, within ten days after the making thereof, be entered with the registrar of the county court within whose jurisdiction the wife is resident, and a copy of such order shall, within such ten days, or within a reasonable time in that behalf, be served upon the husband And it shall be lawful for the husband to apply to the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, or to the magistrate or justices by whom such order was made, for the discharge thereof, and they may (if they think fit) discharge the same. And the said Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, or magistrate, or justices, is or are hereby authorized to discharge such order if it, he, or they shall deem fit.

(Here follows Schedule.)

The reasons which may be urged on behalf of this measure are manifold. They rest at all points on admitted principles of legislation.

In the first place, the Divorce Laws offering to women who can avail themselves of them the remedy of Judicial Separation in cases of the cruelty of their husbands, it is a matter of simple justice that the same remedy should be placed within the reach of those poor women who are subjected to tenfold greater cruelties than those which the court always rules to constitute a ground for such separation. It is impossible to imagine a matter in which the