ENFORCING CONJUGAL RIGHTS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1072, 17 February 1883, Page 1

ENFORCING CONJUGAL RIGHTS.

Sir James Hannen, the Judge of the English Divorce Court, has just denounced from the Bench the power lodged in his Court, which enables him to issue a decree restoring to a husband his conjugal rights. His energetic observations were called forth by a case which came before him under peculiar circumstances. A person bed, in 1881, obtained a decree against his wife, which the wife disobeyed—that is, she declined to live with her husband and would not be compelled. He next got an order of attachment, but failed to serve it, and discovering that the lady had found shelter in the house of Mr Orrell Lover, M.P., he applied to the Court for an attachment against him. The contention of counsel was that Mr Lever was assisting the lady to evade the jurisdiction of the court. ‘ I do not wonder,’ said the Judge, ‘at anyone assisting a woman to resist a jurisdiction which exists in this court only, and which 1 wish did not exist here— namely, the power of committing a woman because she does not return to a husband with whom she does not wish to live.’ Every rightminded man, adds a Home paper, will heartily sympathise with these remarks, and feel grateful to Sir James Hannen for having had the moral courage to utter them. Nothing can be more contrary to aU ideas of fairness and selfrespect than the tt’empt to enforce obedience by means of a survival of a law which never could have had any solid justification. The only theory on which it could be maintained is that a wife is a chattel.