The Potteries Examiner : — 1878-07-27 (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England)

LAWYER'S OPINION, [BY MARK TWAIN,]  IN ANSWER TO A DISCARDED LOVER.  Who writes,—l loved, and still love, the beautiful Edwitha Howard, and intended .to marry her. Yet, during my temporary absence at Benicia, last week, alas! she married Jones. Is my happiness to be thus blasted for life Have I no redress? The lawyer gave his opinion as follows :—Of course you have. All the law, written and unwritten, is on your side. The intention and not the act conetitutee the crime—in other words, constitutes the deed. If you call your bosom friend a fool, and intend it for an insnit, it is an insult ; but if you do it playfully, and meaning no insult, it is not an insult. If you discharge a pistol accidentally, and kill a man, you can go free, for you have done no murder; but if you try to kill a man, and manifestly intend to kill him, but fail utterly to do it, the law still holds the intent.on Constituted the crime, and you are guilty of murder. Ergo, if you had married Edwitha accidentally, and without really intending to do it, would not actually be married al all, because the marriage could not be complete without the intention. And ergo, in the strict spirit of law, since you deliberately intended to marry Edwitha, and did'ut do it, you are married to her all the same— because, ta I said before, the intention constitutes the crime. It is as clear as day that Edwitha is your wife, and your redress lies in taking a club and mutilating Jones with it as much as you can. Any man has a right to protect his own wife from the advances of other men. But you have another alternative—you were married to Edwitha first, because of your deliberate intention, and now you can prosecute her for bigamy, in subsequently marrying Jones. But there is another phase in this complicated case : You intended to marry Edwitha, and consequently, according to law, she is your wife—there is no getting around that; but she did'nt marry you, and if she never intended to marry you, you are not her husband, of comae. Ergo, in marrying Jones, she was guilty of bigamy, because she was the wife of another man at the time; which is all eesy well an far husband She. t fd ie i goes then, don't Jones, and s h h . consequently she was not guilty of bigamy. Now, ac. cording to this view of the case, Jones married a spinster, who was a widow at thesame timeand;another man's wife at the same time, and yet who had no husband and never had one, mid never had any intention of getting married, and therefore, of course, never had been married; and by the same reasoning you are a bachelor, because you have never been any one's husband; and a married inan, because you have a wife living; and to all intents and purposes a widower, because you have been deprived of that wife; and a consummate ass for going off to Benicia in the first place, while things were so mixed. And by this time I have got my self as tangled up in the intricacies of this extraordinary case that I shall lime to give up any further attempt to advise yon—l might get confused and fail to make myself understood. I think I could take up the argument where I left off, and by following it closely for awhile, perhaps I could prove to your satisfaction, either that you never existed at all, or that you are dead now, and consequently don't need the faithless think I could do that, if it would afford you any comfort.