Page:The Legal Subjection of Men.djvu/34

 find money for her solicitors, and has to pay in advance!! He must also pay her alimony pendente lite.

Then when he is dragged to Court by a heartless and vindictive woman, he finds the scales still more heavily weighted against him. The rules might be formulated somewhat in this way:—

1. Every woman's statement complaining of her husband is assumed to be true until he conclusively proves it to be false. The onus probandi is on him, and the difficulty he has to face is that of proving a negative.

2. The slightest harshness or even carelessness of speech or behaviour, no matter under what provocation (the records of years being searched to find one) is absolutely final proof of "cruelty" if committed by the husband. No amount of insolence and brutality—short of actual attempt to maim—is cruelty in a wife. Anything she does is a pardonable exhibition of feminine temper.

3. The husband and his witnesses are prosecuted for perjury on the slightest inaccuracy being discerned in their narration of facts. Deliberate perjury is passed over if committed by the wife, her paramour, or her witnesses.

4. No charge, no matter of what infamous crime, falsely made by a wife against a husband, is a ground for his refusing to take her back. If he should refuse, the Court confiscates for her benefit as much of his property or earnings as they think fit.

One result of these instructive rules of practice is to be found in the number of undefended divorce suits. It is a common saying of the legal profession that multitudes of husbands allow judgments to go against them by default, as they are quite conscious that no man, not of absolutely angelic character—unless he be himself a lawyer—has any chances before a prejudiced pro-feminist judge and jury.