Page:English laws for women in the nineteenth century.djvu/165

153 a spurious son to inherit!" Truly: and the husband's adultery may give his friend,—into whose house he has crept like a thief, to steal faith and honor,—a spurious son to inherit. Or it may give some wretched victim of his seduction, a spurious son to drown or strangle. Or it may give him a spurious son, by some wanton, on whom he lavishes the patrimony of his legitimate sons. No matter! The wrong done by him cannot be measured by equal weight with the wrong done to him: for he is a, and claims his right of exemption, by natural superiority. As Peers cannot be hung, but must be beheaded,—as members of the House of Commons cannot be arrested for debt,—so men cannot be arrested in sin, on equal grounds with an inferior party.

Now it is consistent with all the discretion of justice, that far greater leniency should be practically extended, to a sex whose passions, habits of life, and greater laxity of opinions, make their temptations greater and their resistance less, than is the case among women; and a proportionate severity may well be shewn to that other sex, whose purity is of infinitely greater importance. But to say that divorce,—if permitted at all,—should be permitted to one party only; that Lord Chancellor Thurlow's principle,—that each case should depend on its own peculiar circumstances for decision, and, on the moral impossibility of actual reunion,—should be superseded by the doctrine that only one party can be wronged sufficiently to deserve the extreme remedy, is surely so obvious an absurdity, that it will scarce bear arguing upon: and would be only adding one more anomaly to laws, in which already the jealous and exclusive guarding of masculine rights, is often the foundation of most preposterous wrong.

Called upon to give assent to such a law, even Majesty might feel something of the helplessness of sex: and muse on that accident of regal birth, which has invested her with sacred and irrevocable rights, in a country where women have no rights. The one Englishwoman in England whom injury and