Page:On the forfeiture of property by married women.djvu/8

4 by argument. The subject is one of those which have been agitated for many years, and has gone through the usual stages of a novel truth. It was the wildest of dreams; it was an impious and unholy attempt to loosen the sacred bonds of marriage; its promoters, when not fanatics or dreamers, were dangerous and sinister revolutionists. Then there was something in what they said; after all, there was a good deal of cruelty and hardship in the present system; after all, the law of property seemed to have very little to do with the bond of marriage; after all, the law of England was peculiar, and seemed to resemble the old barbarous codes much more closely than those adopted by civilised nations. Finally, a large number of people found out that what the advocates of a change were saying was exactly what they themselves had been thinking all along.

All honour to those who have fought the losing game till it has become the winning one. I am not one of them. The work has been done at first by the able and persevering gentlemen who form the United Societies for the Amendment of the Law and the Promotion of Social Science, and finally by Mr. Lefevre and Mr. Russell Gurney, who have taken up the subject in Parliament. And if I recur to what I myself have previously said, it is not because there was any originality in it, but only because it was an attempt to put the controversy into a clear and compendious form, to which it may be useful for any one to refer who desires to study its merits.

The later stages of this discussion have been on this wise. In the session of 1868 Mr. Lefevre introduced into the House of Commons a measure which was referred to a Select Committee. Much evidence was taken, bearing mainly on three points:—

1. The existence of hardship under the present law.

2. The avoidance of that hardship by the richer classes through the aid of the Court of Chancery.

3. The practicability of altering the law, as tried in America.

In July, 1838, the Committee reported to the effect that the law bore very hardly on all but the richer classes; and that American experience was in favour of altering it; but, for lack of time, they did not decide in what particular mode the law should be altered.