e continued to disregard the decree requiring her to render
conjugal rights to her husband. This state of things was partly
reformed by the Matrimonial Causes Bill of 1884, and that bill
was passed, not to protect women, but men, against punishment for
refusal to restore conjugal rights. Undoubtedly, the modern
tendency, although it has progressed very slowly, is against
applying compulsion to either husband or wife to yield "conjugal
rights;" and since the Jackson case it is not possible in England
for a husband to use force in attempting to compel his wife to
live with him. This tendency is still more marked in the United
States; thus the Iowa Supreme Court, a few years ago, decided
that excessive demands for coitus constituted cruelty of a degree
justifying divorce (J.G. Kiernan, _Alienist and Neurologist_,
Nov. 1906, p. 466).

The slender tenure of the wife over her person is not confined to
the sexual sphere, but even extends to her right to life. In
England, if a wife kills her husband, it was formerly the very
serious offence of "petit treason," and it is still murder. But,
if a husband kills his wife and is able to plead her adultery and
his jealousy, it is only manslaughter. (In France, where jealousy
is regarded with extreme indulgence, even a wife who kills her
husband is often acquitted.)

It must not, however, be supposed that all the legal inequalities
involved by marriage are in favor of the husband. A large number
of injustices are also inflicted on the husband. The husband, for
instance, is legally responsible for the libels uttered by his
wife, and he is equally responsible civilly for the frauds she
commits, even if she is living apart from him. (This was, for
instance, held by an English judge in 1908; "he could only say he
regretted it, for it seems a hard case. But it was the law.")
Belfort Bax has, in recent years, especially insisted on the
hardships inflicted by English law in such ways as these. There
can be no doubt that marriage, as at present constituted,
inflicts serious wrongs on the husband as well as on the wife.

Marriage is, therefore, not only not a contract in the true sense,[359]
but in the only sense in which it is a contract it is a contract of an
exceedingly bad kind. When the Canonists superseded the old conception of
marriage as a contract of pu