Page:On the forfeiture of property by married women.djvu/19

15 protection order. When the order is granted the provisions for making her a free woman need not be excepted to. But that she should be driven to institute a suit for an account which is sure to be disputed in a hostile case, and may be very minute and intricate, and after all is left to the discretion of the judge, is no slight evil. The cost would be an effectual bar to it in most cases. And why should her freedom depend on so grotesque and capricious a criterion as her earning half the expenses of her family? The mother of a family has something to do besides earning money. Numbers of cases might be put to show the fallacy of such a test. I will put only one, which may easily happen in factory towns. Suppose a woman with a large family of children, doing little paid work herself, but receiving and managing the earnings of the children, superintending the household and keeping it together. Why should not she have any little property of hers protected against a bad husband? Yet Mr. Raikes's test would leave her in the lurch. Her property passing by mere delivery would be his, and other property would be seized and strictly settled in the mode before described.

I will only observe on two other very singular effects of this Bill. One is that as protection orders may be cancelled, outsiders would never know without searching a register whether a wife was under disability or free from it—a most inconvenient state of things. The other is that women with bad husbands would be better off as regards the power of applying their money to their wants than those with good ones, for the well-conducted couples would remain under the law of strict settlement; whereas the wife who earned half the family expenses might dispose of her property according to her own judgment. And so, when the wife had some capital which was wanted for the family use, there would be a direct inducement to throw on her the earning of wages.

I have confined myself in these remarks to the broad effects of the Bill, which appears to me only to add one instance to the many that are constantly appearing of the perils that environ those who desert the plain, broad path of simple principles to follow inventions of their own fancies. The existing law we know, and the law of freedom we know; but what is this Bill? Better far the common law than these shackles of paternal government in every household. Mr. Raikes's little finger is