and vile” and meriting twelve years' penal servitude) the woman was rewarded by damages for £100, to be obtained from the very victim whom she had done her best to maim for life (besides being unfaithful to him) and who had generously abstained from prosecuting.
But it is not merely in cases of murder, attempted murder or serious assault that justice is mocked by the present state of our law and its administration in the interests of the female sex. The same attitude is observed, the same farcical sentences on women, whether the crime be theft, fraud, common assault, criminal slander or other minor offences. We have the same preposterous excuses admitted, the same preposterous pleas allowed, and the same farcical sentences passed—if, indeed, any sentence be passed at all. The following examples I have culled at random:—From John Bull, 26th February 1910: At the London Sessions, Mr Robert Wallace had to deal with the case of a well-dressed woman living at Hampstead, who pleaded guilty to obtaining goods to the amount of £50 by false pretences. In explanation of her crime it was stated that she was under a mistaken impression that her engagement would not lead to marriage, that she became depressed, and that she “did not know what she said or did,” while in mitigation of punishment it was urged that the money had been repaid, that
