Miss Cobbe, in a letter which we publish in another
column, makes the inefficiency of the law against cruel wife-beat- ing,—a crime which is certainly rather on the increase than the decrease,—a strong argument for women's suffrage. And it may be true that if the very peculiar and illogical form of women's suffrage favoured by Miss Cobbe,—that which would give the suffrage to women-householders only, in other words, mainly to spinsters and widows, and would deny it to wives,—were carried, a much more stringent law might be pro- posed, if not passed. But the real diffemity of such a law is not what Miss Cobbe thinks it,—men's indifference to these brutalities, —but rather the reluctance of wives to have severe penalties im- posed. A law which is habitually ignored is a danger to the State, and in nine cases out of ten, it is the wives who, partly from affection, and partly because they know that to be the means of inflicting a severe sentence on their husbands involves a final separation from them, entreat from the Judge the utmost lenity in the ap- plication of the law. If wives had votes, brutal and drunken husbands would, we fear, be punished oven less severely than they now are.
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