rights to her husband.  This state of things was partly reformed by the Matrimonial Causes Bill of 1884, and that bill was passed, not to protect women, but men, against punishment for refusal to restore conjugal rights.  Undoubtedly, the modern tendency, although it has progressed very slowly, is against applying compulsion to either husband or wife to yield “conjugal rights;” and since the Jackson case it is not possible in England for a husband to use force in attempting to compel his wife to live with him.  This tendency is still more marked in the United States; thus the Iowa Supreme Court, a few years ago, decided that excessive demands for coitus constituted cruelty of a degree justifying divorce (J.G.  Kiernan, Alienist and Neurologist, Nov. 1906, p. 466).

The slender tenure of the wife over her person is not confined to the sexual sphere, but even extends to her right to life.  In England, if a wife kills her husband, it was formerly the very serious offence of “petit treason,” and it is still murder.  But, if a husband kills his wife and is able to plead her adultery and his jealousy, it is only manslaughter. (In France, where jealousy is regarded with extreme indulgence, even a wife who kills her husband is often acquitted.)

It must not, however, be supposed that all the legal inequalities involved by marriage are in favor of the husband.  A large number of injustices are also inflicted on the husband.  The husband, for instance, is legally responsible for the libels uttered by his wife, and he is equally responsible civilly for the frauds she commits, even if she is living apart from him. (This was, for instance, held by an English judge in 1908; “he could only say he regretted it, for it seems a hard case.  But it was the law.”) Belfort Bax has, in recent years, especially insisted on the hardships inflicted by English law in such ways as these.  There can be no doubt that marriage, as at present constituted, inflicts serious wrongs on the husband as well as on the wife.

Marriage is, therefore, not only not a contract in the true sense,[359] but in the only sense in which it is a contract it is a contract of an exceedingly bad kind.  When the Canonists superseded the old conception of marriage as a contract of purchase by their sacramental marriage, they were in many respects effecting a real progress, and the return to the idea of a contract, as soon as its temporary value as a protest has ceased, proves altogether out of harmony with any advanced stage of civilization.  It was revived in days before the revolt against slavery had been inaugurated.  Personal contracts are out of harmony with our modern civilization and our ideas of individual liberty.  A man can no longer contract himself as a slave nor sell his wife.  Yet marriage, regarded as a contract, is of precisely the same class as those transactions.[360] In every high stage of civilization this fact is clearly recognized, and