If anything is iniquitous and revolting, it is the power of the husband over the person and the actions of his wife; the right over her of correction, still tolerated in our days. There must be a directing power in the household; the husband must be the depositary of this power, which should be limited, and controlled by the family council. Legal omnipotence demoralizes the husband, who believes in the end in the lawfulness of his despotism. It is said that custom establishes precisely the contrary of what the laws prescribe: this is generally true, but it is at the expense of the moral character of the wife, thus forced to have recourse to artifice. "Restore liberty to women, since liberty is truth!" exclaims Legouvé. "This will be, at the same time, to affranchise man. Servitude always creates two slaves: he who holds the chain and he who wears it." Antiquity, the Middle Age, and the centuries nearer our own, punished the adultery of the wife severely, even cruelly, yet did not admit that a man could become guilty of this offence with respect to his spouse. Our present code acknowledges, indeed, that the husband can commit adultery, but only in case he maintains his mistress under the conjugal roof; the wife is an adulteress everywhere, and is punished severely; as to the husband, his punishment is a farce. "Such impunity," says M. Legouvé, "is not only injurious to order, it is an insult to public morals, _it is a lesson of debauchery, given by the law itself_." If, by adultery, the wife wounds the heart of an honorable man, introduces false heirs into the family, she at least can abstract nothing from the common fortune; while the husband, in the same case, can ruin the family, while increasing the number of natural children and provoking his wife to wrong by his neglect and brutality. The husband, besides, is more criminal than the wife, for he seeks adultery, while, on the contrary, it comes to the wife under a thousand attractive forms. Notwithstanding, the adultery of the woman deserves greater punishment than that of the man.... Ah! M. Legouvé, is this logic? The Oriental wife was and is still, a slave, a generatrix; the Roman wife was something more than this; the wife of the Middle Age owed her body to her husband, but the Courts of Love had decided that her affections could, nay, should belong to another. To-day, the ideal of marriage is enlarged; we comprehend that it is the fusion of two souls, a school for mutual perfection, and that the two spouses should belong wholly to each other.