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here, as it has been found on the other mind the House that the principle of side of the Atlantic, that the idea that the Bill of his right hon. and learned family division would be the result will Friend had received affirmation suggest only a smile. They will receive regarded some of its most important the blessing of multitudes of toiling clauses, when it was considered by a women who now, when they see the Select Committee, only by the casting hard earnings of a fellow-workwoman vote of his right hon. and learned Friend. swept away, gather together in the streets, The Government had promised to deal saying "What is the use of a'body with the question of law reform; the fustriving." And they will have the higher sion of law and equity must necessarily reward of witnessing the great improve- affect the rights of married women; and ment in the working classes, which will that alone was a sufficient reason for withbe the natural and necessary conse- holding their full assent from the measure quence of increased self-respect, arising under discussion. The Bill proceeded from increased sense of responsibility practically upon an assumption that the among the women, and increased respect first act of every husband was feloniously for womanhood among the men. One to appropriate to himself his wife's proword more, Sir, and I have done. I perty. He did not doubt the singleness have reason to know that the women of of the intentions of his right hon. and this country feel deeply on this question; learned Friend-they were above susthe poor women, especially, feel that picion-but the object of those who supthey are suffering a grievous wrong. I ported him was two-fold, including the have to appeal on their behalf to a Le- recognition of the novel principle of civil gislature elected exclusively by men. I equality between the sexes. Imaginary trust that it will appear that the Mem-rights were mingled with the real wrongs bers of a Legislature, so elected, are as of women. With regard to the operakeen to discern the evil, and as earnest tion of the Bill if it passed into law, he in applying a remedy, as if the appeal believed an inducement would be offered were made on behalf of those whose to a husband to exercise duress, in order voices could be heard at elections, and to obtain possession of the property whose votes could be recorded at the which the Bill gave to the wife alone. hustings. An hon. and learned Member, who was oracular position in the House on these not now present, had acquired a kind of subjects. He alluded to the hon. and learned Member for Richmond (Sir Roundell Palmer), who, at a recent meeting of the Juridical Society, had expressed an opinion adverse to altering the present position of married women. In France, before the Revolution, there existed two systems, under the name of the Dotal regime, in the first of which a portion of the wife's property was assigned to the husband, while over the remaining portion, called the paraphernalia, she had the entire control and management; but, under the second system, called the community system, the husband had control over the wife's property until the community was dissolved by death or separation, and the wife could not alienate any portion of her real property without the husband's consent. There was another form of the Dotal régime in Scotland. Was it not, then, rather rash that we should take so summary a step as that proposed to be taken by this Bill? In America husbands and wives lived in hotels, without

Motion made, and Question proposed,

"That the Bill be now read a second time."-(Mr. Russell Gurney.)

MR. RAIKES said, that having, in the exercise of his duty last year, moved the rejection of this Bill upon its third reading, he felt it to be due to the House that he should explain the reason why he did not adopt that course on the present occasion. He fully agreed with the right hon, and learned Member (Mr. Russell Gurney) as to the miserable and scandalous state of the law on this question, and as to the absolute necessity for a great and speedy change. At the same time, he did not think the House should commit itself to the details of this measure, and he was afraid that, in endeavouring to relieve us from existing evils, the right hon. Gentleman's Bill would involve us in others far worse. He (Mr. Raikes) had himself introduced an alternative scheme, and he trusted that the House would read both Bills a second time on that day, in order that both might be considered together by a Select Committee. He must re

Mr. Russell Gurney

the comfort of the homes in which the English so much delighted, and their case did not apply to us. He would protect the wife, not merely against the rapacity of the husband, but against her too great willingness to give up her property to her husband, and he would do this by the appointment of an official guardian over property which ought to belong to herself, and to go to her children. He would propose that the husband should, in the first instance, be the trustee of any property belonging to his wife, but that the wife should have power to oust him from his trusteeship by application to a County Court Judge. He deprecated the passing of this measure, on the ground that it would disturb the peace of every family, and destroy for ever that identity of interests at present existing between husband and wife, which had hitherto been regarded as the basis of the Christian family, and the peculiar characteristic of English society. The House was asked to create a factitious, an artificial, and an unnatural_equality between men and women. But he also objected to the Bill, on the ground that it created an inequality between husband and wife; it retained to the wife the sole use of her property, and yet still obliged the husband to support the family. He asked the House to pause, and not to legislate on the eloquence of his right hon. and learned Friend, but to pass the best of the two measures. He asked it, further, to appoint a Select Committee on the Bill, and also on his (Mr. Raikes') Bill, for the purpose of obtaining a dispassionate settlement of this important question, lest when they endeavoured to give a great boon to society they should pass a Bill which would be unjust and humiliating to Englishmen, and would be still more unjust and, in its ultimate results, humiliating to English women.

plish the object but was the only one that the House could adopt for accomplishing it. They had heard from the hon. Member for Chester (Mr. Raikes) a great many objections against the Bill. In the first place, he had told the House that though the Bill had been before the Select Committee, the most important clause in it had been only carried by the casting vote of the Chairman. Now, he (Mr. Jessel) had had the honour and the pleasure of sitting on that Committee, and he was totally unaware of that fact. Then it was suggested that the Government were about to introduce a great measure of law reform, which would include the fusion of law and equity; but he saw no reason for waiting for this large measure, when there was already a Bill before the House for accomplishing a portion, at all events, of its purpose. Another objection was that the Bill assumed that the husband was a villain. Now, what was desired was to deter from crimes by creating a fear of punishment. Because they passed laws against theft they did not stigmatize all citizens as thieves; nor did they, by passing laws against bad husbands, stigmatize all the married men in the country as villains. The hon. Gentleman said that some husbands did seek to deprive women of their property. Well, if so, they were villains. Bill did not interfere with the Courts of Equity, which treated women the weaker vessels, and accordingly protected their weakness. They admitted that the woman was entitled to protection, and they wished to surround her with a means of escaping from the coaxing or bullying of the husband who wanted to get hold of her property. The_Bill, in fact, was a poor woman's Bill. It was intended to apply to the cases of women who were left unprotected by settlement, and to them. MR. JESSEL said, the hon. Gentle- it would afford protection in the only man who had just sat down had ob- way in which it could be given to them viated the necessity of discussing the-by making them the legal owners of principle of the measure by introducing one himself for the protection of wives from brutal and fraudulent husbands. The question, then, was the best mode of accomplishing a common object, and he thought that those who had read the two Bills before the House would be of opinion that the Bill of the Recorder of London (Mr. Russell Gurney) was not only the one best calculated to accom

The

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their own property. His objection to the measure of the hon. Member for Chester was, that its first clause transferred to a trustee all the property of a married woman, except such parts as were transferable by mere delivery. The property of poor women consisted generally of a few clothes, a little furniture, and, perhaps, a small sum of money; and this, the property most urgently

The House divided:-Ayes 46; Noes a Select Committee, which would have 208: Majority, 162.

Main Question, as amended, put, and instructions if any difficulty occurred in agreed to.

Order of the Day for the Second Reading, read.

LORD HOUGHTON, in moving that the Bill be now read the second time, said, he believed he had taken a somewhat unusual course in privately requesting the attendance of those Members of the House whom he believed to be friendly to the measure. Whether the same course had been pursued on the other side he did not know; but he trusted it would not be implied that this was regarded as a party question, for, in common with the noble Duke opposite (the Duke of Richmond), he strongly deprecated such a view of it. He had now the honour of presenting to their Lordships the first measure of importance which had come up from the House of Commons during the present Session. It had passed that House by a large majority, composed of Members sitting on both sides of the House; and last year the majority in its favour was still larger, and nothing but the lateness of the Session prevented it then coming before their Lordships. The House would, he was sure, give due though not excessive weight to the fact that the Bill had been approved by a very large majority of the House of Commons, as also, to the circumstance that the signatures of the Petitions presented to the House of Commons in its favour exceeded 25,000, while in this House there had also been a considerable number of such Petitions. It was now many years ago that he had had the honour of bringing forward in the House of Commons and of carrying on the second reading a Bill with the same object, and he had long given much attention to the subject. Hence it was, he presumed, that he had been requested to take charge

of the present measure though he thought the task would better have devolved on some noble Lord who could have approached the question as a new one, and could have regarded it with more distinct reference to present circumstances. Now there was, at starting a feature which distinguished this from questions which ordinarily came under the consideration of their Lordshipsnamely, the fact that part of the opposition to the measure was founded on a deep religious conviction in the minds. of many persons that marriage with the sister of a deceased wife was wrong in the sight of God. Such a conviction he could not but respect, nor could he hope to shake it by any eloquence or arguments at his command; but he had a right to demand that such a doctrine should not rest on inference or deduction, but on an utterance as distinct as that which pronounced the Decalogue on Mount Sinai. The religious objection ought to be proved clearly and distinctly, and if their Lordships believed that marriage with a deceased wife's sister was emphatically and unmistakably forbidden, they would, of course, be bound to vote against the Bill; but if they had no such profound conviction, he would remind them that constructive sins were no better than constructive treasons. No just man would impose disability and misery on other men if he merely thought a thing to be right; it was necessary that he should know it to be right on absolute and unshakable authority. He did not, in saying this, imply that the Levitical law was in no way binding, for that great code was in harmony with the convictions of universal morality, but it must be taken with the limitations of circumstances, time, and place; it did not pretend to speak to the whole of mankind, and if construed in a vulgar and literal sense, it lost all its real beauty and meaning. On this question nature was indifferent, and custom was variable and arbitrary. Nature was surely indifferent, for who professed to regard this union as one from which the general nature of mankind recoiled? There lingered, indeed, the notion that, man and wife being one flesh" the position of the husband and wife was such that all the relationships of the one were the relationships of the other. To extend this notion, however, to the connections of the wife after her