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An exception to the general rule, and even this was of doubtful validity, was introduced under Henry VIII. A wife could be assisted to leave her husband's house if she were journeying to the Bishop's Court to seek a separation.
But the latest feminist rulings of the judges have quite swept away such fine distinctions as those of 1857.
- (1) By their fiction of "cruelty"—anything a husband does being "cruelty"—they have enabled any woman who likes to leave on a pretended excuse.
- (2) By procuring the passing of an Act (Lord Chancellor Cairns' Act, 1884) the Courts got rid of their theoretical duty of ordering a wife to be imprisoned for refusing to obey an order of restitution of conjugal rights. Nothing in the way of compulsion by restraint of person or property is to be applied to the wife. But by a cynical stroke this Act provides that if a husband refuses to obey, his property is to be confiscated. And, more outrageous than all, the wife's power to procure the arrest and imprisonment of the husband by the magistrate's Court is left untouched.
A case in which the wife of a clergyman caused her husband to be arrested on board a ship going to America, and sentenced to hard labour by alleging his desertion, deserves special notice. True that the clergyman, having means, could appeal to a higher Court and have the iniquitous sentence quashed. But the working man would have had to serve his allotted term in the prison cell. And no one has ever suggested that this wife should be punished. (See the case of the Rev. Peter MacDonald Neilson, June, 1894.)
The notorious Jackson case furnished another picture. Here a woman is upheld by the Court of Appeal in deserting her husband and condemning him to life-
