McLAUREN v. AUSTEN.
IT is extremely wrong for a lad to marry without means to support either wife or children. It is still more wrong for hica .to' tell. his fiancée that, having no means, he had better not "That seems to us the state of English middle-class feel- ing' as revealed in the case of "McLauren v. Austen," and it seems to us a particularly absurd one, the reductio ad.absurduni of our procedure in cases of breach of promise. Mies McLauren, a young lady of 24, who exhibited in Court commendable readiness, " great distress of mind," a considerable degree of sharpness about her age, and a white pocket-handkerchief, was, it appears, about eight years ago sought in marriage by a lad named Albert Austen, but rejected him, thinking, with a prudence beyond her years—she was sixteen by her own account, though counsel tried in vain to add three years more—that he had scarcely sufficient means. "That was her only objection." The lad, not being a lad of the nineteenth century, took the rejection to heart, went home and killed himself, and his family seem to have considered that Miss McLauren was to some extent in fault. Very possibly they were all wrong, but still men seldom propose without some encourage- ment, and parents who have lost a son through a girl's coquetry may be pardoned if they attribute to her a heartlessness which was very likely quite invisible to herself. At all events, a bitter feud sprung up between the McLaurens and Austen, which, however, did not prevent a brother, Alfred Austen, a clerk on £150 a year in the lace-dealing firm of Coplestake and Moore, from also falling in love with Louisa McLauren, or her from accepting him. The courtship lasted two years, it is true, but " he made me love him at last." The engagement continued for eighteen months and seems to have been a perfectly honest one, " Alfred," as appeared from his letters, being very sincerely in love, and "Louisa," though she talked in Court about " nobody knowing how much she loved him," still being quite ready to marry, when, influenced apparently by his father's remonstrances, Alfred broke off the engagement. He wrote a letter, which though vulgar in expression was manly enough in tone, declaring that he had hoped at the time of the engagement to be speedily in a better position, but that he was still dependent on his family, and likely to be ; that their opposition made life a burden to him, that he saw no prospect of depend- ing wholly upon himself, and that he thought the marriage had better be broken off. There was no suggestion of any kind iu aggravation of damages, the engagement had only lasted eighteen months, and Mr. Austen had not married anybody else ; but nevertheless the jury gave Miss McLauren £75 damages, which will do her no good, beingswallowed up in expenses; and Mr.
Austen has to pay that and costs, which, if he depends upon his salary, would be equivalent to utter ruin. Even supposing, what is quite possible, that his employers and fellow-clerks after reading the evidence hold him blameless, or at worst infirm of purpose, the direct pecuniary fine will amount to two years' salary, and will probably take him ten years or more to overtake. Is it under our social system fair to inflict such a penalty for such an offence?
We cannot see it, even if we put for the moment all the higher arguments out of sight. Apart altogether from the question of the lady's sufferings, on which we have something to say presently, and of the real character of our system of marriage by choice, it seems to us that, regarded as a breach of contract, the penalty is much in excess of justice. The custom of the country ought to be taken into consideration in this, as in every other case of contract ; and if there is a custom rooted among us, or at least among those classes of us who do not appeal to the rates, it is that a man should not marry until he has some income, and that if he has no prospect of any he should not continue an engagement ; that, in fact, passion is in some limited degree to be subordinated to prudential reasons. In nine cases out of ten it would be held that a young man situated as the defendant in this case was who released the girl from her engagement was doing a self-denying act, that is, provided he were sincere, of which there was no evidence one way or the other ; while a girl who did the same thing would be held by a jury of matrons to have been highly deserving, to have suppressed her own impulses in favour of filial feeling and ordinary prudence. Men, it is true, are not supposed to yield to their fathers on such points, and Alfred Austen is very likely a weak person ; but still he yielded to a not unnatural, though prejudiced pressure, and pleaded a reason which, if true,—and no attempt was made to dispute its truth,—would have been regarded anywhere out of court as perfectly sufficient. What, in fact, if the affair is to be regarded exclusively as one of civil contract, had Miss McLauren lost? An interminable engage- ment, a long-continued prohibition to marry anyone who gave her the chance,—a " detriment," in fact, to employ a slang which for once precisely expresses the truth. If she had other chances—and if she had not the main reason for such actions falls to the ground—her release was to her a positive gain, an unmixed good, an exemption from a contract binding her to her own hurt ; it was a permission to refuse to take-an article worth less than she expected.
We quite admit that to treat such suits as suits for ordinary breach of contract, for non-delivery of goods as it were, is unfair, be- cause they are not suits of the kind ; but then that is the founda- tion of the law, and if we rise to a higher region such suits become something worse than questionable claims. If we are to consider, as counsel invariably tell the jury to consider, the injury to the young lady's affections, the blow to a trusting heart and all that, how does it happen that such injuries can be atoned for by payment of a small sum of money ? The action itself is its own answer. No girl capable of feeling what counsel always attribute to girls who bring such actions, ever brought one, or could bring one, or would suffer any one else to bring one for her. No idea of such compensation would ever enter her head, and if the idea of punishing her lover did, which is much more possible, the suit would be dismissed as too degrading a form of punishment, worse even than a fine,—always is, as a matter of fact, dismissed wherever the feeling has been deep, and it is for depth of feeling that damages are given. The breach of faith is seen to yield what it really does yield, an escape from misery. The punishment, therefore, falls on persons whose acts, though not innocent, are not injuries, and the total result of the law is that it operates only in cases where it has no justification, that it punishes only offences which are really benefits, and compensates only those injuries which are not felt. Either Alfred Austen was a sneak, who skulked in a treacherous way out of a binding en- gagement, or he was an ordinary young man who pleaded a reasonable and quite customary argument for requesting, for the lady's sake as well as his own, to be released. In the former case he confers a benefit on his fiancee in releasing her from a husband so unworthy ; in the latter, for what is he fined in two years' income?
We remember to have heard but one argument in defence of our law about breach of promise which was worthy of considera- tion, and that was from a shrewd, worldly-wise old attorney. " The law," he said, "is indefensible in principle, but in practice it works well. English young men of the class which defends such actions are very selfish, very coarse, and very much afraid of
marriage, and they would but for this law make an amusement of i the Norman castle now stand, " set fire to it, and hurled the constantly forming and breaking these engagements. That would be a real injury to the women of their class, as well as to social security, for amidst the competition created by the unequal num- bers of the sexes to be jilted is a disqualification, and a dis- qualification, however slight, often involves the loss of the only pleasant or endurable career a girl can hope for. Our women are not Frenchwomen. They have no money." That argument, coarse and concrete as it is, is quite true ; but then, is not this very law one of the causes which make it so true, the main reason why such engagements are entered into with such careless- ness and haste ? They are formed every day without the slightest consideration, without any appeal to friends, with no ceremonial, without any one circumstance likely to create the impression that they are biudiug or important, and are broken off in the same way, either with no result, or, as in this case, with a resulting penalty of the most severe kind. If the law were repealed, there would, we believe, spring up among those whom the law exclusively affects,—that is, the lower middle-class, for neither the edu- cated nor the labouring classes ever bring such actions,—a new etiquette, a habit of surrounding an engagement with social securities and forms not unlike those in use in Germany, a " way " of considering betrothal equivalent in sacredness to marriage, and therefore to be entered upon only after reflection and with a certainty that a capricious dissolution of the tie would be as much reprehended by opinion as the desertion of a house- hold. Surely that would be a far preferable etiquette to the one which exists, and would in no degree impair that right of choice upon which, if it is not to be utterly remodelled, Western society must be based. The great right of flirting, that is, of choosing wives and husbands after some kind of free acquaintanceship, a right which, after all the laughter, is still the key-stone of our social arrangements, would be in no degree impaired, would be rather strengthened ; while an engagement would cease to be what it is now, a legal right which those for whom it was created never dream of enforcing, and of which those for whom it was not intended make an engine of oppression. Only Amelia Roper ever succeeds in an action for breach of promise, and of all human beings Amelia Roper has least need of aid from the law.
Our arguments, of course, do not apply—we say it because the objection is always produced—to any case iu which a charge of seduction forms part of the plaintiff's evidence. That is entirely a different matter from breach of promise,—has puzzled legislators for years, and probably will puzzle them to the end of time. It is scarcely possible to make it a penal offence ou one side only—though such a law would not be unjust, the social penalty, which is far more severe, falling exclusively on the woman—and no Legislature would pass a law indicting penalties upon both. There often exists too in such cases a need for pecuniary compensation, the girl losing her means of livelihood ; and brutal as our law seems, it probably works as well, inflicting as it does on one side a heavy fine and on the other a public exposure, as any other which it would be possible to pass. It is not to that we object, but to the law which inflicts a fine for breaking indiarubber, and lets the breakage of china pass unchallenged.
Previous page
