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This precious privilege is nominally confined to cases of minor importance, and in special is supposed not to affect murder. In practice it affects all crimes, and is no dead letter, as illustrative cases can show.
8. Facilities for Divorce.
No man can obtain a divorce except by a terribly expensive process in the High Court at a minimum charge of forty pounds. This means a denial of justice to the vast bulk of the male population. Any woman, by the asking for it, can get a summary separation and confiscation of her husband's property, and an order for her maintenance out of his earnings from the nearest police court. Recent Statutes confer this privilege. This process, which costs only a few shillings, the husband has to pay for.
But divorce or no divorce, the wife's property, where-ever acquired, cannot be touched. There is no question here of interfering with her "earnings" though she be an opera singer with £40,000 a year. Similarly with her capitalised property, which, though man-acquired, as usual, cannot be touched.
If her property, as well as her husband's, has been handed over to the trustees of her marriage settlement the Court has some power to make orders as to the income of that property, but in practice uses it only for the benefit of the children.
No matter how flagrant her conduct the wildest dream never suggested that the wife's "earnings" (as artist, opera singer, or what not) no matter how exorbitant, should ever be touched for the benefit even of her children. That a portion should be sequestrated for the maintenance of the husband—even though a husband is incapacitated by disease or accident—of course would be a barbarous suggestion, hardly to be discussed outside Bedlam.
