Page:The Legal Subjection of Men.djvu/36

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settled them as a provision on the delinquent husband? or (to add a grotesque completeness to the parallel) settle them on the husband and his children by his fair seducer?

Yet a similar piece of monstrous injustice—to men, though not to women—is the law of England to-day.

Our pro-feminist judges are presumably indifferent to the fact that the subsidy of the adulteress in this way can have but one result, namely, to "encourager les autres."

10. Custody of Children.

It has always in England been laid down as a fundamental law based on public policy, that the custody of children and their education is a duty incumbent on the father. It is said to be so fundamental that he is not permitted to waive his exercise of the right by prenuptial contract. (See the Agar v. Ellis Case.)

This rule of the Common Law of England is of course in harmony with the policy of all Europe and Christendom, as well as with the historic conditions of the European social organisation, if not with the primal instincts of the race.

Nevertheless, fundamental and necessary as the rule may be, the pro-feminist magistrates and judges of England are bent apparently on ignoring it with a light heart. They have not merely retained the old rule that the custody of infants of tender years remains with the mother until the child attains the age of seven. But they go much further than that. As a matter of course, and without considering in the least the interests of the child, or of society at large, they hand over the custody and education of all the children to the litigant wife, whenever she establishes—an easy thing to do—a flimsy and often farcical case of technical "cruelty."

The victim husband has the privilege of maintaining the children as well as herself out of his property or