ies concerned,
without any question of delinquency coming into the question, but those
parties would at the outset themselves determine the conditions regulating
the contract. But nothing could be more unlike our actual marriage. The
two parties are bidden to accept each other as husband and wife; they are
not invited to make a contract; they are not even told that, little as
they may know it, they have in fact made a very complicated and elaborate
contract that was framed on lines laid down, for a large part, thousands
of years before they were born. Unless they have studied law they are
totally ignorant, also, that this contract contains clauses which under
some circumstances may be fatal to either of them. All that happens is
that a young couple, perhaps little more than children, momentarily dazed
by emotion, are hurried before the clergyman or the civil registrar of
marriages, to bind themselves together for life, knowing nothing of the
world and scarcely more of each other, knowing nothing also of the
marriage laws, not even perhaps so much as that there are any marriage
laws, never realizing that--as has been truly said--from the place they
are entering beneath a garland of flowers there is, on this side of death,
no exit except through the trapdoor of a sewer.[358]

When a woman marries she gives up the right to her own person.
Thus, according to the law of England, a man "cannot be guilty of
a rape upon his lawful wife." Stephen, who, in the first edition
of his _Digest of Criminal Law_, thought that under some
circumstances a man might be indicted for rape upon his wife, in
the last edition withdrew that opinion. A man may rape a
prostitute, but he cannot rape his wife. Having once given her
consent to sexual intercourse by the act of marrying a man, she
has given it forever, whatever new circumstances may arise, and
he has no need to ask her consent to sexual intercourse, not even
if he is knowingly suffering at the time from a venereal disease
(see, e.g., an article on "Sex Bias," _Westminster Review_,
March, 1888).

The duty of the wife to allow "conjugal rights" to her husband is
another aspect of her legal subjection to him. Even in the
nineteenth century a Suffolk lady of good family was imprisoned
in Ipswich Goal for many years and fed on bread and water, though
suffering from various diseases, till she died, simply because
sh