was born has become when compared with her
child at school. Yet because the hearty, kindly,
merry-hearted workman she once loved and has
lost won her troth and plighted her his own, she
is doomed for all time to bear the burdens which
his sullen, foul-mouthed, vicious anti-type may
choose to heap upon her. In the worst days
of American slavery we used to read of the
over-hours by means of which some of the
negroes accumulated savings and in time
purchased their liberty. More affecting still were
the efforts made by the freed men or freed
women to purchase back their children. Our
English slaves of the ring enjoy no over hours,
and the whole of their earnings swell the base
gains of their owners, and aggravate their own
ill treatment. They cannot purchase their
liberty. They cannot purchase the liberty of
their children. They are tied body and soul to
the demon of drink, or profligacy, or dishonesty,
and there is no escape from his lashings and
tortures on this side the grave. Our slaves
are of bolh sexes; and the decent workman
whose wife drinks, is in the same hapless plight
as Lucy Bloxham or Polly Comber.

The law declares that a mistaken estimate of
character shall be punished by a life-long
sorrow, and many excellent and well-meaning
people maintain the law to be right. One
of these inveighed the other day from his
place in the House of Commons, against interfering
with a custom, which is the " growth of
ages," and with which, as he insisted, are identified
in some mysterious manner the welfare of
the English people and the prosperity of the
country. That the marriage service would have
to be altered if Mr. Lefevre's measure became
law, and that "enter into a partnership with
this man on equal terms" would have to be
substituted for " love, honour, and obey," and
that a variety of other things of a similarly
terrific character would follow in its wake, were
among the alarming prophecies launched for
the edification of the House of Commons.

That matrimonial misery or family division
would necessarily ensue is, however, disproved
by the experience of America, and especially of
New England. The whole tendency of American
legislation, during the last twenty years, has been
in the direction aimed at by Mr. Lefevre's bill;
and in New England the principle has been in
actual operation for the last dozen years. The
eminent jurist Mr. Dudley Field vouches that
this change has been also effected in the state of
New York without any disastrous consequences.
It is not found that affection is weakened, or
that the natural respect for a husband's authority
is withheld, because women are reinvested with
——or, rather, are not deprived of——rights which
seem justly to belong to every one above the level
of a horse or dog. Much that was said against
the technical provisions of the measure now
before the House may be true. It may be that
it is ill adapted for its purpose, and that Mr.
Shaw Lefevre's honest gallantry may have
overlooked some important objections to its
details and probable working. But let the principle
be admitted that women are not mere
chattels, that it is as possible for them to work,
earn, save, and own, in the eyes of the law as it
is in sober fact, and all else will follow. To
such of our legislators as insist that because the
Normans had female serfs whom they called
wives, therefore the men of the present day
should continue to keep educated and intelligent
fellow-creatures with a halter of disability
about their necks——to appeal against them
to moderation, or humanity, or common sense,
seems worse than useless. But the even
state of opinion in the House and the casting
vote of the Speaker entitle us to hope that
the subject will yet receive impartial
consideration. The committee appointed to
consider it will have ample time to be true to
their trust, and if an honest selection of
witnesses be made, there can be little doubt as to
the result. O! If we could all draw pictures
of the men we have known to live meanly or
cruelly upon the money earned or owned by
their wives, what a wonderful portrait-gallery
might be given to the world!

Marriage is to such men, a lottery in which
there are all prizes and no blanks, and many of
them have lived in as great comfort and
luxury upon their commercially better-halves
as if they were the most industrious and
meritorious of their kind. The wedding-ring
has been the magic talisman preserving them
from the necessity of labour. Nor would this
be such a crying scandal to the community
if they could be satisfied with doing nothing.
But idleness and viciousness are too closely
allied to live separate long, and it follows
that the man who lives upon a woman's
earnings too often follows in the steps of such
fellows as Bloxham and Comber. What circle
of middle-class society is there which cannot
point to a signal example of this kind? What
poor working man or woman is there who, if
not sufferers themselves, can point to workers
in the same calling, or dwellers in the same street
or court, whose lives are permanently made a
burden by the operation of the law? There is,
Heaven knows, little fear of woman being made
unforgiving, or selfish, or unduly grasping, by
any enactment that the wise men of St. Stephen's
can pass. No human law affecting pounds
shillings and pence, is likely to weaken the law
of Nature; and the legislators who trouble
themselves concerning the effect of their work, herein,
upon the national heart, are like flies dreading
the results of their contiguity to the wheel they
buzz upon. Let those over-scrupulous gentlemen
acquaint themselves with the annals of
the poor. Let those professors of the dismal
sciences dive below the calm world in which
"portions," and settlements, and pin-money
(all devices to escape the hard law) are marriage
essentials. Let them gauge positions, and remember
cases where the slow starvation of helpless
children, the bitter mercies of the streets, the
foul infliction of brutal wrong, are the conditions
of a life from which there is no escape. Let them
put themselves in the place of the hardworking