stitute a woman's ruin, in Scotland is her safeguard. So, also, there is equal facility for divorce, which is another bone of contention between the two countries. English people, weary of each other, but with no remedy at home (the divorce court having only come into practice within the last seven or eight years), rushed over the border and got divorced. Subsequently, when such divorces were brought in question before an English court, they were repudiated, and the marriage sustained. In cases where the parties on the strength of this divorce had married again, the complication, litigation, and misery were, of course, fearful. Cases of this kind often occupy the courts for generations. Dickens' description of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce was no exaggeration, but a keen expose of facts. The richest estates are often eaten up in the quarrel for them; and litigation only ceases when both plaintiff and defendant are drained of every shilling. One of these interminable cases is now pending before one or other of the courts every session. The plaintiff is a man with silvery locks and bowed with three score years and ten. The suit was commenced by his uncle when he was a baby. His beautiful daughter has taken up the case now to prove her grandmother's marriage, and is pushing it with great spirit and enthusiasm. She is a wonderfully clever woman; but it is sadly probable that the case will see her rich auburn hair as white as her father's ere the grandmother's marriage is settled.
To return to the loosing process, the Scotch law has another action than divorce. It is jactitation, commonly called "putting to silence." This is one of those barefaced barbarisms which throw a very doubtful light upon "the good old times" of our ancestors. It is a disgrace to any civilized statute book, and has long been extinct in the sister countries. Indeed, it is but just to say that this form of action had not been enforced in Scotland during this century until it was exhumed to do duty in the Yelverton case. Hence, again, the evil of leaving such disreputable rubbish de hors of the legal cesspool, to find its into way civilized society. The only object of appealing to it in these days would be to overthrow an existing marriage; and it is only serviceable to protect a man from the consequences of bigamy. For, if he simply wishes to get rid of his wife, he could do so by divorce for incompatibility of temper or what not. But if he has committed a felonious act himself, he can only get rid of it by striking at the very roots of his first wife's honest fame—declare that she has been living with him in infamy, and that he now wishes to expose her and deprive her of the protection of the supposition that she was his wife. He craves the court to pronounce him "free of all obligations toward the woman," "to fine her a thousand pounds, to be paid to him in shape of solatium to the wounded feelings," which the supposition of this woman's being his wife has caused. He further prays that
