perhaps she has not seen
for twenty years will pounce upon her some day and carry all off.
This legal separation, until lately, the courts of justice would only
give at an expense which made it inaccessible to any one out of the
higher ranks. Even now it is only given in cases of desertion, or of
the extreme of cruelty; and yet complaints are made every day that it
is granted too easily. Surely, if a woman is denied any lot in life
but that of being the personal body-servant of a despot, and is
dependent for everything upon the chance of finding one who may be
disposed to make a favourite of her instead of merely a drudge, it is
a very cruel aggravation of her fate that she should be allowed to
try this chance only once. The natural sequel and corollary from this
state of things would be, that since her all in life depends upon
obtaining a good master, she should be allowed to change again and
again until she finds one. I am not saying that she ought to be
allowed this privilege. That is a totally different consideration.
The question of divorce, in the sense involving liberty of
remarriage, is one into which it is foreign to my purpose to enter.
All I now say is, that to those to whom nothing but servitude is
allowed, the free choice of servitude is the only, though a most
insufficient, alleviation. Its refusal completes the assimilation of
the wife to the slave--and the slave under not the mildest form of
slavery: for in some slave codes the slave could, under certain
circumstances of ill usage, legally compel the master to sell him.
But no amount of ill usage, without adultery superadded, will in
England free a wife from her tormentor.

I have no desire to exaggerate, nor does the case stand in any need
of exaggeration. I have described the wife's legal position, not her
actual treatment. The laws of most countries are far worse than the
people who execute them, and many of them are only able to remain
laws by being seldom or never carried into effect. If married life
were all that it might be expected to be, looking to the laws alone,
society would be a hell upon earth. Happily there are both feelings
and interests which in many men exclude, and in most, greatly temper,
the impulses and propensities which lead to tyranny: and of those
feelings, the tie which connects a man with his wife affords, in a
normal state of things, incomparably the strongest example. The only
tie which at all approaches to it, that betwee