Page:The Legal Subjection of Men.djvu/49

 But a man who would dare to turn "husband's evidence" against a wife, cannot be found within the four seas. The reason stares one in the face. Such a witness would not be welcomed as a servant of justice, and a repentant sinner. No! he would be esteemed by judge, jury, press and public to be a loathsome reptile, unfit for human society. A howl of execration would drive him from the land. Such a depth of morbid sentiment has been reached that even if a man charged with immoral relations with a wife, refuses or omits—presumably through religious or conscientious motives—to come forward and perjure himself on her behalf, an indignant press comments on his conduct, and tells him he has not acted as a gentleman.

A wife seeking divorce and confiscation of her husband's property can exercise all her privileges of violence, insolence, and, under her recent charter, of adultery, without inconvenience, but she can in addition make him guilty as well as herself, with the trivial difference that he will be punished. A wife can get female detectives to send female seducers in her husband's path, and can then produce her hirelings in the box with conclusive proofs of the husband's and their own guilt.

If the attempt be made on the husband's side there is swift retribution. In the first place as the adultery was committed with his own connivance she is quite absolved from legal responsibility. But more follows. At this moment, such witnesses on a husband's side can be sent to prison for successful conspiracy to procure the adultery of a wife. The wife herself wins her suit.

Exactly as in the case of bigamy, the law on murder and homicide are nominally the same for men as for