Perhaps it is a modern notion that marriage is a union of trust and not of suspicion, of expectation of faithfulness the more there is freedom.  At any rate, the tendency, notwithstanding the French decision, is away from the common-law suspicion and tyranny towards a higher trust in an enlarged freedom.  And it is certain that the rights cannot all be on one side and the duties on the other.  If the husband legally may compel his wife to show him her letters, the courts will before long grant the same privilege to the wife.  But, without pressing this point, we hold strongly to the sacredness of correspondence.  The letters one receives are in one sense not his own.  They contain the confessions of another soul, the confidences of another mind, that would be rudely treated if given any sort of publicity.  And while husband and wife are one to each other, they are two in the eyes of other people, and it may well happen that a friend will desire to impart something to a discreet woman which she would not intrust to the babbling husband of that woman.  Every life must have its own privacy and its own place of retirement.  The letter is of all things the most personal and intimate thing.  Its bloom is gone when another eye sees it before the one for which it was intended.  Its aroma all escapes when it is first opened by another person.  One might as well wear second-hand clothing as get a second-hand letter.  Here, then, is a sacred right that ought to be respected, and can be respected without any injury to domestic life.  The habit in some families for the members of it to show each other’s letters is a most disenchanting one.  It is just in the family, between persons most intimate, that these delicacies of consideration for the privacy of each ought to be most respected.  No one can estimate probably how much of the refinement, of the delicacy of feeling, has been lost to the world by the introduction of the postal-card.  Anything written on a postal-card has no personality; it is banal, and has as little power of charming any one who receives it as an advertisement in the newspaper.  It is not simply the cheapness of the communication that is vulgar, but the publicity of it.  One may have perhaps only a cent’s worth of affection to send, but it seems worth much more when enclosed in an envelope.  We have no doubt, then, that on general principles the French decision is a mistake, and that it tends rather to vulgarize than to retain the purity and delicacy of the marriage relation.  And the judges, so long even as men only occupy the bench, will no doubt reverse it when the logical march of events forces upon them the question whether the wife may open her husband’s letters.

A LEISURE CLASS