The Jackson case was a profitable study, as it brought out other questions of social ethics, as well as points of law which were ably settled by the Lord Chancellor.  It seems that immediately after Mr. and Mrs. Jackson were married, the groom was compelled to go to Australia.  After two years he returned and claimed his bride, but in the interval she felt a growing aversion and determined not to live with him.  As she would not even see him, with the assistance of friends he kidnaped her one day as she was coming out of church, and carried her to his home, where he kept her under surveillance until her friends, with a writ of habeas corpus, compelled him to bring her into court.  The popular idea “based on the common law of England,” was, that the husband had this absolute right.  The lower court, in harmony with this idea, maintained the husband’s right, and remanded her to his keeping, but the friends appealed to the higher court and the Lord Chancellor reversed the decision.

With regard to the right so frequently claimed, giving husbands the power to seize, imprison, and chastise their wives, he said:  “I am of the opinion that no such right exists in law.  I am of the opinion that no such right ever did exist in law.  I say that no English subject has the right to imprison another English subject, whether his wife or not.”  Through this decision the wife walked out of the court a free woman.  The passage of the Married Women’s Property Bill in England in 1882 was the first blow at the old idea of coverture, giving to wives their rights of property, the full benefit of which they are yet to realize when clearer-minded men administer the laws.  The decision of the Lord Chancellor, rendered March 18, 1891, declaratory of the personal rights of married women, is a still more important blow by just so much as the rights of person are more sacred than the rights of property.

One hundred years ago, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield gave his famous decision in the Somerset case, “That no slave could breathe on British soil,” and the slave walked out of court a free man.  The decision of the Lord Chancellor, in the Jackson case, is far more important, more momentous in its consequences, as it affects not only one race but one-half of the entire human family.  From every point of view this is the greatest legal decision of the century.  Like the great Chief Justice of the last century, the Lord Chancellor, with a clearer vision than those about him, rises into a purer atmosphere of thought, and vindicates the eternal principles of justice and the dignity of British law, by declaring all statutes that make wives the bond slaves of their husbands, obsolete.

How long will it be in our Republic before some man will arise, great enough to so interpret our National Constitution as to declare that women, as citizens of the United States, cannot be governed by laws in the making of which they have no part?  It is not Constitutional amendments nor statute laws we need, but judges on the bench of our Supreme Court, who, in deciding great questions of human rights, shall be governed by the broad principles of justice rather than precedent.  One interesting feature in the trial of the Jackson case, was that both Lady Coleridge and the wife of the Lord Chancellor were seated on the bench, and evidently much pleased with the decision.