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"dissolved by Act of Parliament." Such an anomaly in the administration of equal laws, is scarcely credible; but it exists; and is murmured against—by the obscure.
This difficulty,—which exists for the poor, on account of the expense of our form of divorce, exists also for women, from the reluctance to allow a divorce on their petition. The first instance of a divorce bill passed in England on the petition of the Wife, was in the year 1801, in the case of Mr Addison, who had lived with the sister of his wife. The late king, (then Duke of Clarence), moved the rejection of the bill; on the ground that marriage in this country never had been, and never ought to be, dissolved, unless for the adultery of the Wife, which alone for ever frustrated the purposes for which marriage had been instituted. Lord Eldon was then Chancellor; but the speaker who answered the Duke of Clarence was the ex-Chancellor Lord Thurlow; who was listened to with rapt attention. Lord Thurlow said, that he had been excited by the bill to examine the whole subject of divorce, and that he was of opinion the remedy was not confined to the husband. He laid this down as the principle that should decide judgment in such cases: namely,—whether the parties can properly live together as man and wife? He said—"Common law and statute law are silent upon the subject, and this is the rule laid down by reason, by morality, and by religion. Why do you grant to the husband a divorce for the adultery of the wife? Because he ought not to forgive her; and separation is inevitable. Where the wife cannot forgive,—and separation is inevitable by reason of the crime of the husband,—the wife is entitled to the like remedy. In this instance, reconciliation is impossible—the wife cannot forgive the husband and return to his house, without herself being guilty of incest. Do such of your Lordships as oppose the bill for the sake of morality, wish or propose that she should? No. You allow that she can never live with him again, as her husband; and is she—innocent, and a model of virtue,—to be condemned, for his crime, to spend the rest of her days in the unheard-of situation, of being neither virgin, wife, nor widow?"
