permitted to her varying in different countries. So again, the life of the male head of the family has been regarded as peculiarly sacred. It is scarcely more than a hundred years since the penalty in England for a wife who murdered her husband was to be drawn and burned;[1] but the husband who murdered his wife was only hanged. The ancient jurisprudence of France was equally severe for crimes against the head of the family, though it was usual to exchange the extreme penalty of burning alive for beheading in the case of well-born women.
Both those who attack and those who defend the indissolubility of the marriage-tie are apt to think that the engagement which man and woman take to remain united "till death us do part" expresses an obligation created by Christianity. This view is the very reverse of fact. The highest civilisations of the old Pagan world had derived or instinctively adopted the theory that marriage was for all time. This was especially true of Rome, where an extravagant tradition said that there was no divorce for five centuries;[2] and of Germany, where Tacitus tells us that a woman had one husband as she had one body and one life.[3] The very exceptions to the rule show that the law aimed at maintaining a general principle with the smallest possible concession to human weakness. Christian Churches evade the recognition of divorce by declaring that there has been no marriage if the man is incapable of founding a family. Athenian law permitted the woman in this case to have
- ↑ It was changed to drawing and hanging in 1790. 30 George III. cap. 48.
- ↑ Ramsay's Roman Antiquities, p. 252.
- ↑ Taciti Germania, cap. 19. Grimm, however, modifies this by showing that divorce was allowed for sterility, adultery, pronounced incompatibility, and persistent desertion.—Rechts-Alterthümer, SS. 453, 454.
