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believes to be honourable and legal: may make him the father of her children, and hamper him with the life-long obligation to support these unhappy offspring: may thus brand her own children with the stamp of illegitimacy, may squander his earnings for years, may finish the tale of her favours by involving him in a suit in the divorce court as a co-respondent, and in a prosecution in the criminal courts as an unwilling witness against his children's mother, and may do all this with absolute freedom from legal penalty. Let a man attempt to improve his financial position, nay, let him, even at a pecuniary loss to himself, exercise the least similar deceit on any woman, and the Criminal Courts descend on him with swift retribution.
The following article in a leading London daily newspaper is instructive:—
"The sentence of seven years penal servitude passed by the Common Sergeant yesterday upon Charles Baker, who has for many years successfully practised bigamy as a profession, is not one day too long. Mr. Baker is evidently a person of irresistible fascination to ladies, and but for the rare courage of one of his victims, who had him tracked through both hemispheres, he might in time have bigamously married the residue of our unmarried women possessing suitable dowers. Quite another sort of bigamist was the cause of an application to Mr. Lane at the South Western Police Court. This was a young woman, who having married yesterday's applicant, while her first husband was still living, was strangely purged of her offence by Mr. Justice Hawkins after a day's imprisonment, on condition that she returned—not to her legitimate spouse, but to the young man who irregularly succeeded him. This she did, but not for long, as the same young man had to complain yesterday, that she had, in turn, deserted him, for an old gentleman she used to go after before. The applicant, like a sensible young man, seemed able to
