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"damages," brought as a first step towards divorce, by her husband against her lover, is not considered as a party in the suit; cannot have counsel; and can only benefit by such chance circumstances in her favour as belong to the defence made by the man against whom the action is laid. Lord Brougham, in 1838, mentioned a case in the House of Lords, in which not only the man proceeded against, was not in truth the woman's lover, but not even an acquaintance; and the action was an agreed plot between him and the husband, who desired so be rid of his wife!
But we have only to look back to the origin of divorce in England, to comprehend, that the protection of the woman was the last thing considered in the framing of its laws. Whether we ought to adopt the view taken by Roman Catholics, and consider marriage as a sacrament, or whether (as Milton bitterly wrote,—when arguing his right to get rid of the wife who was no "help-mate" to him) persons once wedded should be compelled, "in spight of antipathy, to fadge together and combine as they may, to their unspeakable wearisomeness;—forced to draw in that yoke, an unmerciful day's work of sorrow, till death unharness them,"—is no longer an argument in Protestant England. Divorce, in its fullest interpretation;—divorce, which breaks the marriage utterly, and allows of a new choice; the children of which new choice shall be as legitimate and as capable of inheriting by succession, as the children of any other marriages,—is the established law of our land. Divorce parliamentary, and divorce ecclesiastical: Bishops vote in the House of Lords, and therefore it is to be presumed, they vote on divorce cases: and divorced parties are re-married before the Church, and by the ministers of that Church, precisely as they were before, by a ceremony that never contemplated divorce; a startling anomaly, but not greater than all our other discrepancies on this subject. Our marriage ceremony belongs to the compilation of our liturgy; and our liturgy was compiled, not by angels, but by
