Page:Annie Besant, Marriage A Plea for Reform, second edition 1882.djvu/21

 and marries, her husband shall be seized of in her right" (Comyn's Digest, under "Baron and Feme"). If a woman own land in her own right, all rents and profits are not hers, but her husband's; even arrears of rents due before coverture become his; he may make a lease of her land, commencing after his own death, and she is barred, although she survive him; he may dispose of his wife's interest; it may be forfeited by his crime, seized for his debt; she only regains it if she survives him and he has not disposed of it. If a woman, before marriage, lets her land on a lease, the rental, after marriage, becomes her husband's, and her receipt is not a good discharge. If a wife grants a rentcharge out of her own lands (or, rather, what should be her own) without the husband's consent, it is void. All personal goods that "the wife has in possession in her own right, are vested in her husband by the marriage" (lbid); gifts to her become his; if he sues for a debt due to his wife, and recovers it, it is his; if a legacy be left her, it goes to him; after his death, all that was her personal property originally, goes to his executors and administrators, and does not revert to her; so absolutely is all she may become possessed of his by law that if, after a divorce a mensâ et thoro, the wife should sue another woman for adultery with her husband, and should be awarded her costs, the husband can release the woman from payment.

If a woman own land and lease it, then if, during marriage, the husband reduce it into possession, "as where rent accruing on a lease granted by the wife dum sola is received by a person appointed for that purpose during the husband's life," under such circumstances the husband's "executors, not his widow, must sue the agent" (Lush's "Common Law Practice," 2nd. ed., p. 27). In a case where "certain leasehold property was conveyed to trustees upon trust to permit the wife to receive the rents thereof to her sole and separate use, and she after marriage deposited with her trustees part of such rents and died; it was held that her husband might recover the same in an action in his own right. Such money, so deposited, was not a chose in action belonging to the wife, but money belonging to the husband, the trust having been discharged in the payment of the rents to the wife" (Ibid, p. 97). Marriage, to a man, is regarded as a kind of lucrative business: "The next method of acquiring property in goods and chattels is by marriage; whereby those chattels, which belonged formerly to the wife, are by act of law vested in the