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women. But if a wife by poisoning or violence, kills her husband, the administrators of the law show in practice what can be done by twisting a text. The matter will again be referred to under the Criminal Law, but provisionally the rules may be reduced to form somewhat as follows:—
- (1) The least excuse is sufficient to reduce the crime from murder to manslaughter.
- (2) All the wife's statements against her husband are assumed to be true until they are proved to be false.
- (3) The proof of the actual deed of crime must be much more conclusive than in the case of a man.
- (4) If the verdict be a mere chance one of murder, a sympathetic judge announces he will forward to the proper quarter the sympathetic jury's recommendation to mercy. This recommendation is acted on by the Home Secretary as a matter of course in the case of a woman.
- (5) If the verdict is, as it usually is, one of manslaughter, a shamefully inadequate or possibly a merely nominal sentence is imposed.
(a) Poisoning.
This peculiarly treacherous crime is a legitimate mode of self-defence if practised by a wife on her husband.
(b) Violence.
A wife is still "weak woman" when armed with a poker, a metal pot, a vitriol bottle, a petroleum can, or a revolver. If these lethal substances killed her husband it must have been by accident. In any case he had taken her "for better or worse," and had to put up with the consequences. Why did he cross her temper? Besides, even if she were ill-tempered, why did he not make a better selection when marrying? The elimina-
