“I was present, as you know, when you told your story in the Police Court--a story very often told there. I know that you were not to blame, and that all you said was true. Owing to no fault of yours, your wife has left you for a life of vice. Through this misfortune you have lost your home, your children, and your work; and you are going to Canada as a last resource. You and she will pass the rest of your lives in different hemispheres. You are still a young man, strong, accustomed to married life; you are going where married men are wanted, to a country of great spaces and great loneliness, where your homestead may be miles from any other. “This is all true enough; nevertheless you are as closely bound to this wife who has left you for a life of public shame as if she were the truest wife and mother in this city. “If, where you are going, you meet some girl that you would like to marry, you must not, or you will be a bigamist--a criminal. If this girl come to you unmarried, she will, of course, lose her good name. Your children, if you have any, will be born in what is called a state of shame; that they have had no voice in the matter of their birth won’t help them, as you will find. If she refuses to come to you unmarried--and you can hardly blame her--you will probably be driven, like most men in your position, to get what comfort you can from women who are like your wife. Society, of course, condemns these women, men of heart regard them with compassion, men of science with dismay. They breed canker in the nation; but as you cannot marry again, you will, I fear, be driven to their company. “There is nothing special in your case--thousands in this country are in a similar position; you are all governed by an impartial Law. “That Law is this: A woman can divorce a man who is faithless and treats her with cruelty or deserts her. A man can divorce a woman who is faithless. You could have divorced your wife! Why didn’t you? Let us see! “You were first a soldier, and then a working man. They paid you as a soldier, I believe, one shilling and twopence a day; suppose you saved the pence, allowing for your wife not being on your hands, and your children living on air? Fourteenpence a week--three pounds and eightpence a year, if you were lucky. As a workman your wages were thirty shillings a week? With four children you could save perhaps your subscription to the _Hearts of Oak_, and, say, twopence a day besides? Three pounds and eightpence every year. A divorce in the High Court of Justice, for to that you were undoubtedly entitled by the Law, would have cost you from sixty to a hundred pounds. So, if you could have arranged to keep your witnesses alive, you might, with strict economy, have been granted your decree, if not yourself already dead, in, say, twenty years.