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long celibacy. He has absolutely no remedy against her. If she commits any civil injury against any one, he can be sued. If he should live with any other woman, Mrs. Jackson can get a portion of the property confiscated and settled on herself. She is not obliged to ask for a divorce, she can still keep him bound by limiting her demand to a judicial separation.
The criticisms which some lawyers have made on this decision are wide of the mark. It was quite in harmony with the later current of authority, though in violent conflict with the settled Common Law of last century. Tie the man and let the woman free, is the prevalent judicial theory of to-day.
Though the judges could obtain the passing of Lord Chancellor Cairns' Act, 1884, freeing the wife from imprisonment for desertion, there has been no suggestion of promoting an Act to enable a man in Mr. Jackson's position to obtain a divorce.
So enamoured have they become with the new doctrine of feminine predominance in the relation of marriage, that the judges of the House of Lords have actually extended to Scotland their theory of tying the man and letting the woman free. For over three centuries the law of Scotland has provided that desertion for four years on the part of either spouse is ground for absolute divorce, with right of second marriage. For all that long period the Act has been found most salutary in effect. Now the judges in the House of Lords, in the year 1894, have practically repealed it. They have refused to grant a Scotch litigant divorce, although his wife has deserted him for over four years, and at the same time abducted his child. They allege, as the ground for this astonishing "new reading" of the law, that the husband did not really want her to return. As this can be alleged in every case in which a husband does not slavishly implore a shrew to come back, the result is that when a vindictive woman wants to prevent
