obstinacy, however, may yet be the means of redeeming Mr. B.; for certainly the old rival of his family, M. Jean
Crapaud of Paris, who went much too easily into bankruptcy that year, would have come off better by holding
up his head a little longer. So Mr. Bull is not yet to be despaired of; and such other social illustrations of the
condition of his friends and connections in various parts of the country as other law cases of the month supply,
must not be too exclusively interpreted to the general disadvantage of his family. They are often only
isolated cases; though it is right not the less to fix attention on the special injury involved, and demanding
special redress.

Thus in Scotland, or under the interpretation of Scotch law by our highest English tribunal, it would
appear that a man who gets possession of his wife as part of a pecuniary transaction with her father, may
afterwards count upon the law's co-operation in sordidly completing what has been thus sordidly begun. The
law will suffer him, without a reason assigned against the unhappy wife, to cease holding intercourse of any
kind with her, three months after the marriage; will countenance his refusing to speak or sit with her,
living in the same house; will view with the utmost unconcern, his treating her with the extremes of
insolence and contempt before her servants; will sanction his cruel interdict against her either receiving visits,
or paying them; and will allow him, in temporary absences from home, even to leave her without necessary
means of existence;—and then, when this wretched woman, whose "good and kind disposition" her
tormenter freely confesses, no longer able to bear the burden of a life of such unutterable misery, returns to
her father's house and implores for separation and alimony, which the Scotch judges pronounce her entitled to,
the English Law from its higher seat proclaims, that, inasmuch as direct personal violence is not alleged, and
adultery has not been committed, the wife has no remedy whatever, nor even a title to the costs of her
application; and somewhat jocosely the law adds, through the mouth of its exponent Lord Brougham, that
"it might as well be said the husband ought to pay for any other luxury which his wife, after separation,
might think proper to indulge in, as well as the luxury of a lawsuit." Their lordships present laughed, and
it is to be hoped that poor Mrs. Patterson may derive some little comfort from the joke. Nor is it perhaps
less desirable that, in the other cases of the month throwing light upon the marriage laws, a joke should if
possible be made of them, seeing that they certainly fail of any graver sources of satisfaction.

There is the case of a woman who had married again after her first husband had many yeai's deserted her,
prosecuted by her worthless second husband to rid himself of the children she had borne him, dragged from
her bed to the dock, exciting the sympathies of every one in court, and getting off with seven days' imprisonment.
There is another case of a moustachioed fine gentleman who squandered the fortune of a young wife
and left her penniless, to marry another fortune with a middle-aged lady attached to it, and who had not the
additional good fortune to excite any sympathy; but who nevertheless escaped transportation (perhaps because
of his moustachios), and is sent to Bridewell for twelve months. There is a young Donald Macdonald of one
of the islands of the Hebrides, who carries off his young Jessie by main force from her own bed-room, in spite
of an obstinate father who had provided and set his heart on a quite other son-in-law, notwithstanchng a
meddlesome uncle who darted out of sleep and stood shivering in his nightclothes at the youth's Lochinvar-like
audacity, and in defiance of a lidless-eyed dragon of an aunt keeping guard in the very bed of the maiden;
who is nevertheless triumphantly acquitted even of an attempt at wrong doing, and carried home in a popular
triumph. There is a simple German who tries as hard to get free from a young wife as the Highlander to get
fastened to one, but though he has a case that should have entitled him to easy redress, the magistrate can only
refer him to the Consistorial Court with a polite hope that he has the means to go there, and so send him
mystified away. Meanwhile a somewhat similar case, the sexes only being reversed, had been taken in charge by
Lord Brougham before the House of Lords; and, for the first time in that assembly, an incompleted marriage
has been dissolved on the petition of the wife, and proof that the husband had contracted a second marriage
abroad; which certainly seems the strangest contrast possible, in point of "luxury" as of everything else, to
the result in the unhappy case of Patterson. But let us not conclude these notices of legal history without
approval of the legal judgment delivered a few days afterwards in Norris and Cottle, also by Lord Brougham,
and conclusively settling a question which has cost more in anxious litigation than any other in modern
time, that of the non-liability of provisional committee-men.

At last a plan of sewage is about to be tried on a tolerably extensive scale, and at a cost of a quarter of a
million sterling. Up to the point of what is to be done with the sewage when collected and drawn off, there
seems little reason to question the feasibility or efficacy of this plan; but the doubtful point is an all-important
one, for the notion of discharging the sewage at Woolwich must have been formed in ignorance of the tide. A
dead dog launched at Woolwich would never get to sea. A fallacy is founded on the fact that the ebb-tide at
any given spot runs more than six hours; but things carried down by the ebb, meet the flood so as to bring it
within the six hours; and things floated up by the flood will have a tide of more than six hours, seven or
even eight with an easterly wind. This is a danger which will have to be guarded against when the scheme
is so far completed.

With indication of a danger of another kind, as imminent to the comforts and lives of her Majesty's lieges,
our month's summary may be completed. The wreck of an iron steamer full of holiday makers off Southport,
on her way to the Menai and Tubular bridges, has created little sensation because only two lives were
lost; but it was something not far short of a miracle that more than fifty lives were not sacrificed; and the case
is another flagrant example of the outrageous neglect of the surveyors of steamboats, which the result of the
coroner's inquest at Preston makes it the more necessary not to overlook. At that singular inquiry no one
seems to have been examined that was not in some way responsible for the mischief done; while, on the
other hand, not a subpœna was sent to a single passenger; and of the many who attended to give evidence
voluntarily, the worshipful "crowner" declined to examine one. It has nevertheless since transpired that the
steamer was manifestly unseaworthy, that her pilot was not a licensed one, that there was no register or certificate
of her having been duly inspected, that she had no life-boat, only one life-buoy instead of two, only one punt instead
of four punts and boats, that her only pump was out of order, and that all her fittings were crazy and rotten!
The comfortable set-off is the two lives lost instead of fifty; the accident not being "graced with decent
horror" to make inquiry interesting, or worth while. In like manner, about three weeks before, an old steamer
plying on the River Tamar exploded at Devonport, just as she was getting up her steam to convey an entire
dissenting congregation on a day's excursion to the Morwell Rocks; and, because the dissenters did not go into
the air with the boilers, the affair passed off without excitement. Only out-of-the-way people (who don't wait