WIFE-TORTURE IN ENGLAND. 



45 



cities," of which it is unnecessary here to speak. 

 The storms of jealousy thence arising, the hideous 

 alternative possession of the man by the twin de- 

 mons of cruelty and lust — one of whom is never 

 very far from the other — are familiar elements in 

 the police-court tragedies. 



3. Another source of the evil may be found 

 in that terrible though little recognized passion, 

 which rude men and savages share with many 

 animals, and which is the precise converse of 

 sympathy, for it consists in anger and cruelty, 

 excited by the signs of pain ; an impulse to hurt 

 and destroy any suffering creature, rather than to 

 relieve or help it. Of the wide-spread influence 

 of this passion (which I have ventured elsewhere 

 to name Heteropathy), a passion only slowly dying 

 out as civilization advances, there can, I think, 

 be no doubt at all. It is a hideous mystery of 

 human nature that such feelings should lie latent 

 in it, and that cruelty should grow by what it 

 feeds on ; that the more the tyrant causes the 

 victim to suffer, the more he hates him, and de- 

 sires to heap on him fresh sufferings. Among the 

 lower classes the emotion of heteropathy unmis- 

 takably finds vent in the cruelty of parents and 

 step-parents to unfortunate children who happen 

 to be weaker or more stupid than others, or to 

 have been once excessively punished, and whose 

 joyless little faces, and timid, crouching demean- 

 or, instead of appeals for pity, prove provocations 

 to fresh outrage. The group of his shivering and 

 starving children and weeping wife is the sad 

 sight which, greeting the eyes of the husband and 

 father reeling home from the gin-shop, somehow 

 kindles his fury. If the baby cry in the cradle, 

 he stamps on it. If his wife wring her hands in 

 despair, he fells her to the ground. 1 



4. After these I should be inclined to reckon, 

 as a cause of brutal outbreaks, the impatience 

 and irritation which must often be caused in the 

 homes of the working-classes by sheer friction. 

 While rich people, when they get tired of each 

 other, or feel irritable, are enabled to recover 

 their tempers in the ample space afforded by a 

 comfortable house, the poor are huddled together 

 in such close quarters that the sweetest tempers 

 and most tender affections must sometimes feel 

 the trial. Many of us have shuddered at Miss 

 Octavia Hill's all-too-graphic description of a hot, 

 noisome court in the heart of London on a fine 

 summer evening, with men, women, and children, 

 " pullulating," as the French say, on the steps, at 



1 "Hopes of the Human Race," p. 172 ("The Evo- 

 lution of the Social Sentiment "). By Frances Power 

 Cobbe. Williams & Norgate. 



the windows, on the pavement, all dirty, hot, and 

 tired, and scarcely able to find standing or sitting 

 room. It is true, the poor are happily more gre- 

 garious than the rich. Paradoxical as it sound;-, 

 it takes a good deal of civilization to make a man 

 love savage scenery, and a highly-cultivated mind 

 to find any "pleasure in the pathless woods" or 

 " rapture in the lonely shore." Nevertheless, for 

 moral health as much as for physical, a certain 

 number of cubic inches of space are needed for 

 every living being. 



It is their interminable, inevitable propinquity 

 which in the lower classes makes the nagging, 

 wrangling, worrying women so intolerably trying. 

 As millers get accustomed, it is said, to the clap- 

 ping of their mill, so may some poor husbands 

 become deaf to their wives' tongues ; but the pre- 

 liminary experience must be severe indeed. 



These, then, are the incentives to wife -beating 

 and wife-torture. What are the men on whom 

 they exert their evil influence ? 



Obviously, by the hypothesis, they are chiefly 

 the drunken, idle, ruffianly fellows who lounge 

 about the public-houses instead of working for 

 their families. Without pretending to affirm that 

 there are no sober, industrious husbands goaded 

 to strike their wives through jealousy or irrita- 

 tion, the presumption is enormous against the 

 character of any man convicted of such an assault. 

 The cases in which the police reports of them 

 add, " He had been bound over to keep the peace 

 several times previously," or, " He had been often 

 fined for drunkenness and disorderly behavior," 

 are quite countless. Sometimes it approaches 

 the ludicrous to read how helplessly the law has 

 been attempting to deal with the scoundrel, as, 

 for example, in the case of William Owen, whom 

 his wife said she " met for the first time beside 

 Ned Wright's Bible-barrow," and who told the 

 poor fool he had been " converted." He was 

 known to Constable 47 K as having been con- 

 victed over sixty times for drunkenness and violent 

 assaults, and the moment he left the church he 

 began to abuse his wife. 



The pitilessness and ferocity of these men 

 sometimes look like madness. Alfred Stone, for 

 example, coming home in a bad temper, took 

 his wife's parrot out of its cage, stamped on it, 

 and threw it on the fire, observing, " Jane ! it is 

 the last thing you have got belonging to your 

 father ! " In the hands of such a man a wom- 

 an's heart must be crushed, like the poor bird 

 under his heel. 



Turn we now from the beaters to the beaten. 

 I have already said that we must not idealize the 



