THE LAW AND LOVERS' VOWS. T HE breach-of-promise case of "
Crosswell v. Hearn," which was ultimately decided in favour of the. plaintiff, con- tributed at least to the amusement of the publics, if not to its edification. Indeed, a less edifying and more sordid tale of breach of contract could not well have been told under the profaned names of love and marriage. As Mr. Justice Mathew informed the jury, it was nonsense to speak of affection on either aide, and the case could only be dealt with as a pure matter of business. The lady was eminently a woman of business ; more than capable of taking care of herself, as Mr. Lockwood, who was counsel upon the other side, found to his cost. Her business capacities were even displayed in her love-letters. "I hold you to your offer of May 11th," she wrote on one occasion to the defendant, "accepted by me on the 15th, repeated in Ridge's letter of the 21st, confirmed by interview, mother, self, and you on .May 22nd. (I am used to business.) I shall expect you to fulfil the offer you made, and I give you one month, from June 8th to, on or about, July 8th." This is not the language of love or romance, but for businesslike sim- plicity it can hardly be surpassed. On the other hand, the defendant was a gentleman whose commercial success had caused him to be known by his friends under the un- aspirated nickname of "the Golden Urn." His career as an auctioneer and broker of public-houses should hardly have left him incapable of looking after his own interests ; nor was he altogether without experience of the ways of the other sex, ,for he was a widower, and possessed a grown-up daughter, Dolly, to whose strength of will it was owing that the match was broken off. The gentleman made his proposal much in the same spirit as that in which he would have offered for a Public-house; and it was in a like fashion that the proposal was accepted. The machinations of the recalcitrant Dolly, he intervention of the auctioneer's clerk—to whom was deputed the answering of the lady's letters—and the uncom- fortable shuffling of the miserable bone of contention between Dolly and her would-be stepmother, all contributed to make alp a story which was amusing enough to the listeners in Court, but hardly flattering to the principals concerned. Undoubtedly the most pitiful figure was cut by the de- fendant. His attempts at evasion were miserably weak and futile. He pleaded for delay, for further opportunities of courtship—this was after his offer was accepted—for secrecy, on the score that he went in terror of his life from his daughter's anger. What a courtship ! The lover addresses the lady of his heart as "Dear Miss,"—a precautionary measure. "Dear Miss," he writes to her, "I must ask you mot to construe our friendship into a groove of marriage." The lady persisted, however, in putting her own construction 'upon the friendship, and refused to come out of the groove which he deprecated. In pursuance of her end, she too wrote letters, sometimes postcards; and sometimes those postcards were not calculated to allay the wrath of her lover's daughter, or to increase his domestic happiness. Twice do the lovers seem to have met after the lady had given her consent and fixed a date for their union. Once, by appointment, outside -a cemetery. On that occasion the defendant avers that they took the opportunity of burying their love and Tescinding their contract ; but the lady protests that, on the contrary, they only buried their past differences, and ratified their contract anew by shaking hands over it. Another time they met by accident outside a railway-station, and the gentleman took to his heels and ran away ; not from fear, as he explained, but because his corns were hurting him. Whatever was the rate of his speed, or the reason of its acceleration, the lady seems to have caught him up, not dis- daining to pursue him. What might be described as a lover's quarrel then epued. She was armed with a roll of music, and he lost his hat, and also—though that fact is denied—a front 'tooth. In spite of all the lady's pains and perseverance, the 'indomitable Dolly triumphed. There was no wedding; and 'for her "love's labours lost" a jury of her fellow-countrymen awarded the plaintiff 2475 damages.
The peculiar figure at which the jury assessed the damages testified to the difficulty which they confessed to experiencing in arriving at a decision. It is, no doubt, a wise provision of the law that love's labour should not be lost without com- pensation to the losing party. We have been told that, were it not for a salutary fear of legal consequences, young men of the lower middle-class would habitually End an amusement in trifling with the affections of young women in the same state .of life. One would be loth to deprive these young women of legal protection, but nevertheless the law is one that might well be amended. As it stands, it imposes a task upon the jury which is really beyond their powers. A scientific authority once compared lovers to tadfrolee. Some tadpoles turn into frogs, and some do not ; and some lovers turn into husbands, and some stop short of that consummation ; and it is impossible to say, in the lover and the tadpole stage, whether the final development will be reached or not. The language of love is sometimes ambiguous, —witness the "chops and tomato-sauce" episode in the famous case of " Bardell v. Pickwick." The jury, as a rule, not only have to decide as to how far ambiguous words and notions may constitute an understanding between two parties, but also to assess the damages which one of those parties may have sustained by wasting time and affection upon the other. This is really asking too much of the average juryman. Now, there would be one very simple method of lightening their task, which would also afford to young women and their guardians a means of ascertaining whether the lover had any serious intention of developing into a husband or not. Let no promise of marriage be held valid unless it is made in writing upon properly stamped paper. If the plaintiff could produce a formal promise of this kind, there would be no need to go into all the history of a doubtful courtship, or to consider any other factor in the assessment of damages than the respective incomes of the contracting parties. Of course it will be objected that such a proposition is injurious to all the romance of courtship and marriage. But where, we would ask, is the romance in nine out of ten breach-of-pro- mise cases that find their way into the Law-Courts These eases are hardly ever brought except by people whose affections have not been deeply engaged in their acceptance of a suitor. As a matter of fact, the existence of such a law would save many romantic girls from bestowing their affections upon unworthy objects. For one young woman who now brings an action for breach of promise, at least nine are jilted and suffer in silence. The more their affections have been engaged, the less can they bear to tell the pitiful tale of their disap- pointment, and witness the poor little romance of their life exposed to the ridicule and laughter of an unsympathetic world. If it once became an understood thing that the ardent lover should offer such a proof of his good faith, then a girl would know well what to expect from a lover who withheld it. At any rate, parents or guardians of the lower middle-class would not allow a young man to grow "too particular in his attentions "—as their phrase runs—unless he showed a disposition to furnish this guarantee. Then, if the promises were unfulfilled, even the most modest and sensitive maiden could proceed against her faithless lover without loss of pride or dignity. There would be no need to recite the history of the lover's wooing, to tell of kisses and;embraces, to read old letters couched in the fond and foolish language of love, to lay bare for the whole world to gape at, all the sad wounds that love forsworn has inflicted. There would be the written dccument. All that the jury would have to decide would be whether the defaulting lover had written it or not ; and if he had written it, what com- pensation was owing to the woman he had disappointed.
At least the world would be spared the painful spectacle of the modern breach-of-promise case. We might almost say the demoralising spectacle, for surely such trials can serve no good end. They offer a great opportunity to the refined wit of contending counsel, and afford a rather doubtful matter for laughter to idle readers of newspapers, but beyond that, it is hard to see what good they accomplish. The more innocent and worthy of protection a victim is, the less likely is she to seek redress at the cost of such an ordeal, so that, as a rule, the law only benefits those who least deserve its intervention and who are most capable of taking care of themselves. Barristers, newspaper reporters, and the public all conspire to convert an action for breach of promise into a screaming farce, until only the most hardened petitioners can bring themselves to play the undesirable role of the leading parts. And, after all, there is nothing so very funny in the sight of an old man shuffling away from the pursuit of a young woman who has designs on his cheque-book, that the world cannot afford to lose the joke. Such trials are infinitely more injurious to the romance of courtship and marriage than would be the introduction of stamped paper into an engage- ment. As it is, the suiter generally presents his fiancée with an engagement-ring as an outward sign of his fidelity, and it is really hard to see why the additional gift of his signature would hurt the sentiment of his wooing. The honest lover would never wait to be asked for it ; his first anxiety would be to give some undeniable proof of the sincerity of his atten- tion; if he delayed, or showed any hesitation in committing himself beyond the power of retreat, then the girl would know what to expect from him, and would only have herself to blame if she trusted him too far. Why should this amendment of the law of breach of promise be impracticable ? It would immensely simplify that existing law, and might indirectly afford a much more efficacious protection to the weaker party of a contract than that law affords. The lower middle-class young man, to whom the fear of a breach-ofpromise case is but a shadow of a very distant danger, would be much more careful in his "philandering," were there a possibility of its object confronting him with a stamped "pro miss to pay."
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