e rights of woman. These features have been made
permanent to this day by the power the Church gained over common
law,[202] between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, since which
period the complete inferiority and subordination of the female sex
has been as fully maintained by the State as by the Church. The
influence of canon law upon the criminal codes of England and America
has but recently attracted the attention of legal minds. Wharton,
whose "Criminal Law" has for years been a standard work, did not
examine their relation until his seventh edition, in which he gave a
copious array of authors, English, German, and Latin, from whom he
deduced proof that the criminal codes of these two countries are
pre-eminently based upon ecclesiastical law.

Canon law gave to the husband the power of compelling the wife's
return if, for any cause, she left him. She was then at once in the
position of an outlaw, branded as a run-away who had left her master's
service, a wife who had left "bed and board" without consent, and whom
all persons were forbidden "to harbor" or shelter "under penalty of
the law." The absconding wife was in the position of an excommunicate
from the Catholic Church, or of a woman condemned as a witch. Any
person befriending her was held accessory to the wife's theft of
herself from her husband, and rendered liable to fine and other
punishment for having helped to rob the husband (master) of his wife
(slave).

The present formula of advertising a wife, which so frequently
disgraces the press, is due to this belief in wife-ownership.

Whereon my wife ... has left my bed and board without just cause
or provocation, I hereby forbid all persons from harboring or
trusting her on my account.

By old English law, in case the wife was in danger of perishing in a
storm, it was allowable "to harbor" and shelter her.

It is less than thirty years since the dockets of a court in New York
city, the great metropolis of our nation, were sullied by the suit of
a husband against parties who had received, "harbored" and sheltered
his wife after she left him, the husband recovering $10,000 damages.

Although England was Christianized in the fourth century, it was not
until the tenth that a daughter had a right to reject the husband
selected for her by her father;[203] and it was not until this same
century that the Christian wife of a Christian husband acquired the
right of eating at table with him. For m