wives are in general no better treated than slaves; but no slave is
a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as
a wife is. Hardly any slave, except one immediately attached to the
master's person, is a slave at all hours and all minutes; in
general he has, like a soldier, his fixed task, and when it is
done, or when he is off duty, he disposes, within certain limits,
of his own time, and has a family life into which the master rarely
intrudes. "Uncle Tom " under his first master had his own life in
his "cabin, " almost as much as any man whose work takes him away
from home, is able to have in his own family. But it cannot be so
with the wife. Above all, a female slave has (in Christian
countries) an admitted right, and is considered under a moral
obligation, to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so
the wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained
to--though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his
daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it
impossible not to loathe him--he can claim from her and enforce the
lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the
instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations.
While she is held in this worst description of slavery as to her
own person, what is her position in regard to the children in whom
she and her master have a joint interest? They are by law his
children. He alone has any legal rights over them. Not one act can
she do towards or in relation to them, except by delegation from
him. Even after he is dead she is not their legal guardian, unless
he by will has made her so. He could even send them away from her,
and deprive her of the means of seeing or corresponding with them,
until this power was in some degree restricted by Serjeant
Talfourd's Act. This is her legal state. And from this state she
has no means of withdrawing herself. If she leaves her husband, she
can take nothing with her, neither her children nor anything which
is rightfully her own. If he chooses, he can compel her to return,
by law, or by physical force; or he may content himself with
seizing for his own use anything which she may earn, or which may
be given to her by her relations. It is only legal separation by a
decree of a court of justice, which entitles her to live apart,
without being forced back into the custody of an exasperated
jailer--or which empowers her to apply any earnings to her own use,
without fear that a man whom perhaps she has not seen for twenty
years will pounce upon her some day and carry all off. This legal
separation, until lately, the courts of justice would only give at
an expense which made it inaccessible to anyone out of the higher
ranks. Even now it is only given in cases of desertion, or of the
extreme of cruelty; and yet complaints are made every day that it
is granted too easily. Surely, if a woman is denied any lot in life
but that of being the personal body-servant of a despot, and is
dependent for everything upon the chance of finding one who may be
disposed to make a favourite of her instead of merely a drudge, it
is a very cruel aggravation of her fate that she should be allowed
to try this chance only once. The natural sequel and corollary from
this state of things would be, that since her all in life depends
upon obtaining a good master, she should be allowed to change again
and again until she finds one. I am not saying that she ought to be
allowed this privilege. That is a totally different consideration.
The question of divorce, in the sense involving liberty of
remarriage, is one into which it is foreign to my purpose to enter.
All I now say is, that to those to whom nothing but servitude is
allowed, the free choice of servitude is the only, though a most
insufficient, alleviation. Its refusal completes the assimilation
of the wife to the slave--and the slave under not the mildest form
of slavery: for in some slave codes the slave could, under certain
circumstances of ill usage, legally compel the master to sell him.
But no amount of ill usage, without adultery superadded, will in
England free a wife from her tormentor. 

I have no desire to exaggerate, nor does the case stand in any need
of exaggeration. I have described the wife's legal position, not
her actual treatment. The laws of most countries are far worse than
the people who execute them, and many of them are only able to
remain laws by being seldom or never carried into effect. If
married life were all that it might be expected to be, looking to
the laws alone, society would be a hell upon earth. Happily there
are both feelings and interests which in many men exclude, and in
most, greatly temper, the impulses and propensities which lead to
tyranny: and of those feelings, the tie which connects a man with
his wife affords, in a normal state of things, incomparably the
strongest example. The only tie which at all approaches to it. that
between him and his children, tends, in all save exceptional cases,
to strengthen, instead of conflicting with, the first. Because this
is true; because men in general do not inflict, nor women suffer,
all the misery which could be inflicted and suffered if the full
power of tyranny with which the man is legally invested were acted
on; the defenders of the existing form of the institution think
that all its iniquity is justified, and that any complaint is
merely quarrelling with the evil which is the price paid for every
great good. But the mitigations in practice, which are compatible
with maintaining in full legal force this or any other kind of
tyranny, instead of being any apology for despotism, only serve to
prove what power human nature possesses of reacting against the
vilest institutions, and with what vitality the seeds of good as
well as those of evil in human character diffuse and propagate
themselves. Not a word can be said for despotism in the family
which cannot be said for political despotism. Every absolute king
does not sit at his window to enjoy the groans of his tortured
subjects, nor strips them of their last rag and turns them out to
shiver in the road The despotism of Louis XVI was not the despotism
of Philippe le Bel, or of Nadir Shah, or of Caligula; but it was
bad enough to justify the French Revolution, and to palliate even
its horrors. If an appeal be made to the intense attachments which
exist between wives and their husbands, exactly as much may be said