WIFE-BEATING.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE uSPECTATOR.1 SIR,—My experience as a magistrate, and my reading of police reports, convince me that Miss Cobbe is right in asserting that men have no such sense as she has of the evil of wife-beating and other forms of cruelty to women. Gentlemen do not beat their own wives, but they rarely show or feel much indignation at the cruelty of the lower classes towards either women or children. I do not remember having ever known or read of the full penalty being inflicted for the most cruel treatment of a wife ; oftenest magistrates are content with the sham punishment of binding over to keep the peace. Brutality is a large element in the character of most Englishmen, and not less in gentlemen than in boors; only the latter show it by their acts, and the former by their indifference to those acts. The Englishmen who read with complacency how those "real gentlemen," the Turks, dispose of wounded Russian prisoners by lighting fires upon their stomachs, are not likely to be much moved by the injuries inflicted on a wife with a paraffin lamp. And if all we hear of " Society " being on the aide of the Turks is true, it is from men with an innate sympathy with brutality that our legislators and administrators of the law are
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