157
world to suppose he had been the cause of my quarrel with my husband; and Sir "William Follett's representation of Mr Norton, as a fond, faithful, and injured husband, to stand as uncontradicted as Sir Fitzroy Kelly's echo of that description, in the cause decided by Lord Abinger when Sir John Bayley's evidence was refused. The first step should be the step taken in the Scotch courts. Let the wife be capable of defence, and let the husband be untempted by "damages."
I turn from the subject of divorce, to the subject of divorceless separation; full of the same difficulty of obtaining justice.
The Legislature, which very properly discourages and discountenances separation between man and wife, acknowledges no legal change in the position of an undivorced woman. To stand the brunt of a vile and indecent action at law, and afterwards reside apart from her husband for ten, fifteen, twenty years,—with every human circumstance, except death, that can put division between them,—does not affect the legal fiction which assumes that a married couple are one. The husband retains all his rights over her and her property. If he please, he can bring an action for restitution of conjugal lights; and he may seize her even by force, when "harboured" against his will, by friends or relations. He retains the right of bringing an action for divorce, even in a case like mine. Mr Norton had precisely the same right to divorce me, (if he could obtain a verdict), after the mock-trial against Lord Melbourne, that he had before; and it may be observed in Sir John Bayley's letter, that, on my application for some books and journals left at home, he stipulated with Sir John (even while making amicable arrangements), that, if those arrangements failed, he should have the journals returned to him, "in case they might be of use to him in the Ecclesiastical or other Courts"—this stipulation and implied threat, being within three months after writing the "Greenacre" letters! So that I was to be divorced, or taken home again; whichever turned
