Mr. Lefevre has sent to the Times a remarkable letter
from Mr. Dudley Field, of New York, a very eminent jurist, on the actual operation of the law in that State which gives married women the legal control of their own property. For 20 years New York has given to married women the absolute control of their own property, but only since 1860 of their annual or weekly earnings. Mr. Dudley Field says he has never heard of a quarrel about property arising under this law which would not have arisen equally under the old law. Generally, the wife allows her husband to be the dispenser of her income. When the wife takes her affairs out of the hands of her husband, it is usually a prudential measure, suggested by her husband himself. Only in cases of absolute alienation is this done from motives of distrust and pre- caution. A great many savings' bank accounts are in the wife's name, but this is mostly in order to save the husband's time, a personal application and signature to receipts being requisite. The custom and the law require the husband to provide for the whole family or household expenditure, without any contribution from the wife's private means. Only if the father is unable to provide enough for the family may the mother be called upon to do so. Mr. Field says the reformed law in this respect is wholly satisfactory, and only sometimes abused in the direction in which our own post-nuptial settlements are abused. He thinks the same abuses could always be contrived, even under our law, by arrange- ments in a very slight degree more complicated.
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