WIFE-TORTURE IN ENGLAND. 



43 



often ask myself: " Why, then, is not something 

 done to lift and increase, instead of to depreciate 

 and lower, that sacred influence ? Why are not 

 mothers allowed to respect themselves, that they 

 may fitly claim the respect of their sons ? How 

 is a lad to learn to reverence a woman whom he 

 sees daily scoffed at, beaten, and abused, and 

 when he knows that the laws of his country for- 

 bid her, ever and under any circumstances, to 

 exercise the rights of citizenship ; nay, which 

 deny to her the guardianship of himself — of the 

 very child of her bosom — should her husband 

 choose to hand him over to her rival out of the 

 street ? " 



The general depreciation of women as a sex is 

 bad enough, but, in the matter we are consider- 

 ing, the special depreciation of wives is more 

 directly responsible for the outrages they endure. 

 The notion that a man's wife is his property, in 

 the sense in which a horse is his property (de- 

 scended to us rather through the Roman law than 

 through the customs of our Teuton ancestors), is 

 the fatal root of incalculable evil and misery. 

 Every brutal-minded man, and many a man who 

 in other relations of life is not brutal, entertains 

 more or less vaguely the notion that his wife is 

 his thing, and is ready to ask with indignation 

 (as we read again and again in the police reports), 

 of any one who interferes with his treatment of 

 her, " May I not do what I will with my own ? " 

 It is even sometimes pleaded on behalf of poor 

 men, that they possess nothing else but their 

 wives, and that, consequently, it seems doubly 

 hard to meddle with the exercise of their power 

 in that narrow sphere ! ' 



1 Stripped of the euphemisms of courtesy where- 

 with we generally wrap them up, it cannot be denied 

 that the sentiments of a very large number of men 

 toward women consist of a wretched alternation of 

 exaggerated and silly homage, and of no less exagger- 

 ated and foolish contempt. One moment on a pedes- 

 tal, the next in the mire ; the woman is adored while 

 she gives pleasure, despised the moment she ceases 

 to do so. The proverbial difficulty of introducing a 

 joke into the skull of a Scotchman is nothing to that 

 of getting into the mind of such men that a woman is 

 a human being— however humble— not a mere adjunct 

 and appendage of humanity ; and that she must have 

 been created, and has a right to live, for ends of her 

 own, not for the ends of another ; that she was made, 

 as the old "Westminster Catechism" cays, "to glo- 

 rify God and enjoy him forever," not primarily or 

 expressly to be John Smith's wife and James Smith's 

 mother. We laugh at the great engineer who gave as 

 his opinion before a royal commission that rivers were 

 created to feed navigable canals ; and a farmer would 

 certainly be treated as betraying the "bucolic mind" 

 who avowed that he thought his horse was made to 

 carry him to market, and his cat to eat his mice and 



I am not intending to discuss the question of 

 the true relation between husbands and wives 

 which we may hope to see realized when 



" Springs the happier race of human kind" 



from parents " equal and free " — any more than 

 the political and social rights of women generally. 

 But it is impossible, in treating of the typical case 

 wherein the misuse of wives reaches its climax in 

 wife-beating and wife-torture, to avoid marking 

 out with a firm line where lies the underground 

 spring of the mischief. As one of the many re- 

 sults of this proton pseudos, must be noted the fact 

 (very important in its bearing on our subject) that 

 not only is an offense against a wife condoned 

 as an inferior guilt, but any offense of the wife 

 against her husband is regarded as a sort of petty 

 treason. For her, as for the poor ass in the fable, 

 it is more heinous to nibble a blade of grass than 

 for the wolf to devour both the lamb and the shep- 

 herd. Should she be guilty of "nagging" or 

 scolding, or of being a slattern, or of getting in- 

 toxicated, she finds usually a short shrift and no 

 favor — and even humane persons talk of her of- 

 fense as constituting, if not a justification for her 

 murder, yet an explanation of it. She is, in short, 

 liable to capital punishment without judge or jury 

 for transgressions which in the case of a man 

 would never be punished at all, or be expiated by 

 a fine of five shillings. 1 



Nay, in her case there is a readiness even to 

 pardon the omission of the ordinary forms of law 

 as needlessly cumbersome. In no other instance 

 save that of the wife-beater is excuse made for a 

 man taking the law into his own hands. We are 

 accustomed to accept it as a principle that " lynch- 

 ing" cannot be authorized in a civilized country, ' 

 and that the first lesson of orderly citizenship is 

 that no man shall be judge, jury, and executioner 

 in his own cause. But when a wife's offenses are 

 in question this salutary rule is overlooked, and 

 men otherwise just-minded refer cheerfully to the 

 circonstance attenuante of the wife's drunkenness or 



spare his cheese ; yet where women are concerned- 

 beings who are understood to be at least quasi- ration- 

 al, and to whom their religion promises an immortal 

 life hereafter of good and glory— the notion that the 

 '■final cause of woman is man," seems never to strike 

 them as supremely ridiculous. 



1 Old English legislation embodied this view so far 



as to inflict the craelest of all punishments— burning 



to death— on a woman guilty of petty treason, i. e., the 



murder of her husband, while the husband was only 



liable to hanging for murdering his wife. A woman 



j was burned to death under this atrocious law at Ches- 



! ter, in 1760, for poisoning her husband. The wretched 



| creature was made to linger four months in jail under 



her awful sentence before it was executed. 



