“No God, no heaven, in the wide world.”
CHAPTER XIII.
BREACH OF PROMISE CASES.
Every now and then, while the courts sit at Westminster, the general public derives an immense amount of entertainment from what are described as breach of promise cases. It is true there is a wonderful sameness about them. The defendant is amorous, and quotes a great deal of poetry. The court vastly enjoys the perusal of his letters, and the papers quote them entire and unabridged. The lady suffers much, and the public sympathies are decidedly with her. Of course there are some atrocious cases, for which the men who figure in them cannot be punished too severely; but as a rule, we do think the men have the worst of it. A young man is thrown into the company of an attractive young female; they both have little to do at the time, and naturally fall in love. She has as much to do with the matter as he, and yet, if he begins to think that he cannot keep a wife—that the marriage will not promote the happiness of the parties concerned—that the affair was rash, and had better be broken off—he is liable to an
action for breach of promise. Such cases are constantly occurring. The jury being decidedly romantic—thinking love in a cottage to be Elysium—forgetting the vulgar saying that when poverty comes in at the door love flys out of the window—mark their sense of the enormity of the defendant’s conduct in refusing to make an imprudent marriage, by awarding to the lady substantial damages.
Now, we can understand how English jurymen—generally men with marriageable daughters, can easily make up their minds to give damages in such cases, but we more than question the invariable justice of such a course. When affection has died out, we can conceive no greater curse than a marriage; yet either that must be effected, or the jury will possibly agree to damages that may ruin the defendant for life. This we deem bad, nor do we think that a woman should always have before her the certainty that the promise given in that state of mind, which poets describe as brief insanity, an amiable jury will consider as an equivalent to an I.O.U. to any amount they please. We do protest against confounding a legal promise to marry with a promise to pay the bearer on demand £1000. We rather fear that this distinction is likely to be overlooked, not but that occasionally an action for breach of promise has a very happy effect. It serves as a moral lesson to ardent youths of an amorous disposition. It also furnishes the broken-hearted and forsaken fair with a dowry, which has been known to purchase her a husband in almost as
good a state of preservation as the gentleman who was to have borne that honoured name. All that we find fault with is the number of such cases.
A gay deceiver is no enviable character for any respectable man to wear. No man of mental or moral worth would voluntarily assume it. But a spinster coming to a court of justice, and saying to the defendant, “You have taken my heart, give me your purse,” is no very desirable position for a woman, though she may have the fortitude and strength of mind of a Mrs. Caudle herself. At any rate, the legal view of woman is very different to the poetical one, and for ourselves we infinitely prefer the latter. The view of the jury is, that a woman not marrying a man who has evidently no love for her, or he would not have married another, is to the plaintiff an injury—we think it is a happy escape—and an injury which deepens as the courtship lengthens. The jury reasons that the plaintiff, Mary Brown, is as good-tempered a girl as ever lived—that provided she could but marry she did not care who made her his wife. The position of the sexes is reversed, and the woman sings—
“How happy could I be with either,
Were t’other dear charmer away.”
According to the jury, if Jones had not married Mary Brown, Jenkins would—consequently hers is a double loss. So that if a woman reaches the ripe age of thirty, by this arithmetic she is more wronged than she would have been had she been a blooming lass of twenty. In
the same manner there is a delicate sliding-scale for defendants in such cases. A bridegroom well-made and well-to-do has to pay no end of sovereigns for the damage he has done; while a short time since, a defendant who had been attacked with paralysis was let off for £50. Woman, in this view of the case, is as dangerous as a money-lender or a shark. Byron tells us—