Only their wives; but how those wives suffer! Is there any misery equal to theirs, any slavery to compare with theirs? If so, I never heard of it. I have seen thousands of them, and their existence is our shame and degradation. These wives almost invariably have to support the husbands that knock them about; precious little these fellows earn, and what they do earn is spent in the public-house. Their homes--one cannot call them homes--their abodes, often one, or at the most two rooms, are insufferable and indescribable. How can it be otherwise, when the slave-woman, the child-bearing machine, goes out daily to work and wash for others? She has neither strength nor heart, and ultimately no desire, to work, wash, or clean at home, and dirt, unspeakable dirt, is the result. At last they become so perfect in their misery that they never heed their foul disfigurement, but live and stew and breed in their misery and dirt. These wives will put up with a lot before they complain to the magistrates, and it is only when the wounds are fresh, and pain and resentment have not yet subsided, that they will give evidence against their husbands. Smarting under their wrongs, they rush to our courts and beg for protection, but when the summons has been granted and a week has elapsed before it is heard, their resentment cools, and very little evidence can be obtained from them; in fact, many wives do not appear, and a great number of those that do appear lie unblushingly to the magistrate in order to save their husbands from prison. Sometimes these fellows have neither the grace nor the sense to see that these poor women are perjuring themselves for their sakes, and so, with that instinctive chivalry so characteristic of them, they proceed to cross-examine in order to show that the blame was the wife’s, and that the punishment she received was but fair and reasonable--in fact, the legitimate outcome of her conduct. This often raises the last bit of spirit the wretched woman has left in her, for even the worm will turn, and then the truth comes out, and the slave-owner goes to prison.