Another tailor, James Wright, also brought before the Lord Mayor on the same day for the like offence, had hit his wife twice on the head with a sleeveboard, cutting open her skull in three places, had struck her with his fist in the face, and continued to knock her about for three or four minutes. At the Thames Police Office, likewise on the same day, James Cropley, a Lancashire collier, was charged with committing an assault upon his wife, which consisted in felling her to the earth by dealing her a blow in the face with a heavy stick that knocked her nose flat. Six months' imprisonment and hard labour only, were the sentences on these gentlemen also. No blame to the Mayor or the Magistrate. The law at present unfortunately does not empower them to enter such savages at the School of Correction for the extra of penal dancing.
Since these cases, others of similar atrocity have occurred, and continue to occur so frequently as to suggest the existence of a downright mania for wife-beating. In other forms of mania the whip has happily been disused; but it is the only cure for this. There is clearly no other help. Cure?—preventive we should rather say. Dastards—with the fear of the scourge before their eyes—have ceased to assail the Royal person, and would very soon begin to respect that of the mere female subject. Thus the possibility of being whipped would restrain them from rendering themselves liable to whipping; a consideration which quite conquers the repugnance one feels at the thought of lashing a human being—if such a phrase can be applied to a brute. Whipcord, therefore, would never, probably, have to whistle, or thong to crack, to the howl of any such ruffian after all: but, if occasion were given for such music, we must say our ears would not be too delicate to bear it.
The present Home Secretary is evidently determined to keep his department in order, and may doubtless be depended upon for making Home tolerable to a poor woman, in as far as he can, by warranting her such protection as a cat-o'-nine-tails can afford against the ferocity of a brutal husband.
That's the Way the Money Goes.
A law-suit has lately been reported in all the papers, with the appropriate heading of "Money versus Money." Considering that law is generally the madness of many for the gain of the few—namely the lawyers—we think Money against Money would be a good title to almost every cause that is tried.
THE LORDSHIP OF LONDON.
The pageant of the "Lord of Misrule" was one of the zanyisms of the middle ages. The thing, if not the name, still survives in the Lord Mayor's Show.