The Sun.
London, England, 1857-05-15 00:00:00

EDUCATION.

performance of such duties to parental feelings. If this
were the case, why should the property of the mother
be taken from her in order to enable the father to
discharge these duties ? No one would contend that
parental feelings were not at least asstrong in the female
as in the male, and that being the case, there was no
excuse for placing the wife's property at the dis-
posal of the husband. He would not trouble the
house by reading a bead-roll of grievances which had
arisen under the present law ; such cases must now be
familiar to all ; but there was one instance which he
would refer to, because it illustrated a very large class
of cases. It was taken from a letter from an eminent
solicitor, which appeared in a late number of the Edin-
burgh, Review. This gentleman was applied to by a lady
of rank and influence, whose daughter had just eloped,
and was asked to try and stop the marriage. The young
lady had a great deal of property in the books of the
Bank of England. The solicitor was fortunate enough
to arrive at the church before the marriage was solem-
nised. The young lady being of age he had no power to
stop the marriage ; but he succeeded in postponing it for
24 hours, and, during that period, the bridegroom, a
11 young officer, was so loud in his professions as to what
he would do for bis future wife, that even the solictor,
with all his experience, was taken in. Accordingly a
deed was prepared settling the young lady's property on
herself, and before the marriage it was attested in the
vestry by the officiating clergyman. After the ceremony
was over, however, the old lawyer, inspired with profes-
sional caution, sent to the Bank of England, and put a
distringas on the young lady's property. It was most
fortunate that he did so, for almost at the earliest pos-
sible period after the marriage the husband went to the
Bank of England, and demanded a transfer of the stock
into his own name. This the distringas prevented, and
thus the solicitor had the good fortune to secure the
property to the lady herself. This was a specimen of
cases wbioh are happening every day ; and if any doubts
existed on the subject, they might be easily removed be-
fore a committee. Now, he might be asked what remedy
he proposed to apply to the present state of the law ?
What he proposed was, in the first place, to give to females
of the middle and humbler classes the same powers with
respect to property before marriage that were now ex-
ercised by the higher classes, with the aid of solicitors
and settlements. He fully admitted the difficulty of
legislating wisely on such a subject, but he was happy
to say that the whole question had been fully investi-
gated by a learned society, to which many distinguished
members of that house belonged—he meant the Law
Amendment Society—and that society had,almost unani-
mously come to the conclusion that one of the first steps
in the improvement of the law was to leave to the wife
the sole enjsyment of her own property before marriage,
so far as it was not affected by any settlement. This
was no new principle in legislation, it was a principle of
the Roman law, which was described by Lord Lyndhurst
as the noblest monument of human wisdom. It was also
oneof the principles of the German law, and of the law of
the United States. The United States of America had
for the most part adopted the English law ; but having
found that portion of the English law which related to
this subject very injurious to the community, they bad
adopted the principle of giving to married women ex-
cltisive rights over their own property. The hon. and
learned member then read a letter from Mr. D. Field,
an American lawyer at New York, in reply to one from
the Committee of the Law Amendment Society, in
favour of the view which he was advocating. The ques-
tion, he said, would be asked, if property was to be
secured to a married woman by the common law, what
liabilities should attach to her. On that point he had no
hesitation in saying that a wife should be as much liable
for all her own acts as she was before marriage. That
was the case in equity at present, when a wife had a
separate estate. But if this principle were adopted, the
extraordinary anomaly of the husband being liable forall
the debts contracted by his wife before marriage, must
at the same time be abolished. (Hear, hear.) The hus-
band was now liable for the wrongful acts of his wife,
even for the slanderous use of her tongue ; but he thought
that if a wife were made capable of holding property
under the common law, she ought to be reponsiblo for
her own conduct. He was convincedtbat to say that the
women of England desired to escape from such respon-
sibility would be a gross slander. They knew that moral
responsibility attached to every individual, and they
thought that in this matter legal responsibility ought
to accompany it. He thanked the house for the
patience with which they had listened to his re-
marks ; and he would only say, in conclusion, that
as the upper classes of society possessed all the requisite
machinery for protecting themselves, what he now
asked the house to do was to give the middle and work-
ing classes of society similar benefits to those which the
upper classes enjoyed. He would now move fur leave to
introduce the gill.