Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/550

 536 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY destined to decay. A royal Court of Probate was established in its place at Westminster Hall, with district registries throughout the kingdom ; and the various ecclesiastical juris- dictions which the new court superseded ceased to exist thence- forward, so far as testamentary causes were concerned. The creation in 1858 of a Court for Divorce and Matri- monial Causes has been a measure, necessary no doubt, but not productive of unmixed benefit. Divorce a vinculo matri- monii, fifty years ago, was unrecognised by English juris- prudence, except where it was the result of an Act of Parlia- ment. The laxer law of an exceptional period which followed upon the English Reformation had long disappeared, and from the close of the seventeenth century down to the recent statutes of our own days no one could be divorced otherwise than by the Legislature. After the year 1798, Parhament had declined to grant the relief to any husband who had not previously obtained damages at law against the adulterer, and prosecuted a further suit in the Ecclesiastical Courts for a divorce a mensd et thoro. When a Divorce Bill reached the Commons from the Lords, the question of adultery had thus been tried three times over. The practice was adopted in 1840 of referring such cases to a Select Committee of nine members, who heard counsel and examined witnesses. This was the fourth and not the least expensive inquiry of all. A divorce in 1837 was therefore a luxury of the wealthy — a privUegiium beyond the reach of a poor man's purse. Its average cost in an ordinary case was estimated at from IjOOOZ. to 1,500Z. An anecdote — timeworn among the bar — relates that the final stimulus to the change of public opinion which brought about reform was supplied by the caustic humour of the late Mr. Justice Maule. He was try-^ ing for bigamy a prisoner whose wife had run away with a paramour and left him with no one to look after his chil- dren and his home. " Prisoner at the bar," said the judge to the disconsolate bigamist, who complained of the hardship of his lot, " the institutions of your country have provided you with a remedy. You should have sued the adulterer at the assizes and recovered a verdict against him, and then taken proceedings by your proctor in the Ecclesiastical