New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1874-09-03
WIFE BEATING.

Nowhere, we suspect, Is the morality OF
marital castigatiOn seriously discussed outside
of England. This comes, perhaps, not Of any
peculiar cruelty of disposition, but from the
diaectical nature of the English mind; while,
in addition to this, there is the taurine pro-
pensity to look at everything with utilitarian
eyes, Although all the Anglican races are
fond of domestic life, they are a little
ashamed of its sentimentalities, and as the
scale of culture descends this feeling degen-
crates into something very much like brutality.
1t is a bit startling to find husband, in an
English newspaper, defending the fustigation
of wives with the greatest apparent solemnity,
and informing the public of the large success
which has followed his own trial of that kind
of discipline. He tells his story in a
straightforward way, and without the least
SAVIOR of squeamishness. He informs the
world that he married a girl who was
GOOD looking, well taught, and accomplished
in music and the ways of society; and he
casually remarks that they were "soOn blessed
"with twins, and periodically with further in
"creasen Here the story begins to darken.
The wife grew dirty and drunken; the home
was reeking with filth and vermin the chill
dren were neglected, ill-fed, unclean, rickety,
malformed, and distorted; the husband was
overwhelmed, he says, with foul abuse /;
and g. the woman sold or pawned
everything she could lay her hands
upon. The writer seems to have borne all
with incredible patience until he was COM
pelled to wash and iron his own shirts Then,
and not till then, did he proceed to admins
ter the desperate remedy required by the
desperate disease.
Not in drunken passion, he says, but
"after cool and steady deliberation," he
boxed the ears of this unfaithful wife
right and left until her head dropped
and her bitter tongue was still. He
caught her in a lie, and applied slipper to her
ears till she acknowledged the falsehood. and
promised never to tell another. When she
came home drunk, "he knocked all the sense
cleft out of her body but she rose from the
1" ground, vile heap of dirt and filth, to a
Z" sense of her condition and shame" He did
this, he says, "as kind father would correct
"an erring child" He "braved tho worlds
"opinion, and bit hard, right and left"
This rather heroic treatment, for such we
must allow it to have been, we are assured
by the Doctor himself was followed by the
happiest effects. The patient is now a re-
formed woman; she has given up drinking
she has no further occasion to pawn the fur
niture; and her husband says piOusly: 81
Railways think she was intrusted to me to be
"broken because there was some good in her,
al. e., if marriages are made in Heaven
This story is rehearsed because the writer fears
that Parliament may pass additional bills
against the lovely and Indispensable practice of
wife-beating. The tendency of this, he as
sures us, would be to deprive England of
"a healthy, manly, upright Stock A good
wife makes a good husband; bad wife does
not deserve one-such are the domestic ethics
of our spouse-compelling friend. 1t rather
than otherwise diminishes our confidence in
this system to be informed that the
treatment extended over a period of ten years,
so exceedingly tough and obstinate was the
lady. Once she ran away, but then she came
home again to be physicked in the old way,
possibly because she was in love with her
physician, but more probably because, poor
woman, she had nowhere To 20. Some in