Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations: The Veil Lifted, and Light Thrown on Crime and its Causes, and Criminals and their Haunts. Facts and Disclosures.Howe, William F.
History
Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations: The Veil Lifted, and Light Thrown on Crime and its Causes, and Criminals and their Haunts. Facts and Disclosures.
Howe, William F.
Crime -- New York (State) -- New York; Criminals -- New York (State) -- New York; New York (N.Y.) -- Social conditions
The question may arise, and it is pertinent, who employ these divorce
specialists? We answer: All sorts of people. They may be dissolute
actresses, seeking a spurious appearance of law to end an old alliance,
and to prepare for a new one. They may be frivolous, extravagant,
reckless, misguided wives of poor clerks or hard-working mechanics,
infatuatedly following out the first consequences of a matinee at the
theatre, and a "personal" in the daily newspaper. They may be the
worthless husbands of unsuspecting faithful wives, who, by sickness, or
some other unwitting provocation, have turned the unstable husband's
mind to dreams of new connubial pastures and the advertising divorcist.
They may be the "lovers" of married women, who come to engage fabricated
testimony and surreptitious unmarriage for the frail creatures whose
virtue is still too cowardly to dare the more honest sin. They are _not_
the wronged partners of marriage, who, by the mysterious chastising
providence of outraged hearts and homes are compelled, in bitterest
agony of soul to invoke justice of the law for the honor based upon
right and religion. The manufacture of a case of the contrabandists of
divorce is often such a marvel of unscrupulous audacity, that its very
lawlessness constitutes in itself a kind of legal security.
Another question naturally arises: What are such divorces worth? We
reply that the whole business is unblushing fraud upon the dupes who are
entrapped into patronizing the business. Not one of those divorces has
ever yet held good when ultimately contested in open court, by the
parties against whom they have been secretly obtained. Many of them,
however--perhaps thousands!--have served the whole purpose of those
purchasing them, because the husbands or wives so cruelly wronged have
either lacked the means, or the heart to take public legal measures for
exposing the fraud, and setting the divorce aside. How is the poor
clerk, or mechanic, the invalid or unfriended wife, to raise hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of dollars necessary for such a purpose?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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