In speaking of the frequenting of disreputable houses, neither Montesquieu, nor Dr. Wood in his "History of Civil Law," finds a single word to say as to the moral degradation of the race, of the special degradation of woman involved in it, but both grow eloquent concerning the ruin of the State. It requires a sounder mode of thinking than most men possess to see the relation between the ruin of the State and their own bad habits, the loss of one man's purity. Thus the laws concerning adultery, or divorce for that cause, bring the heaviest penalties, social and legal, upon the head of an offending woman. The legal excuse for this positive injustice is the safety of the family and the State,--the great crime of imposing upon a family false representatives of its name and honor; but a woman's brain and conscience are too clear to rest in this masculine decision. If a man cannot bring a false representative into _his own family_, he can carry it into his neighbor's, when his profligate life violates the social compact; and, as to his own family, his vices may injure it far more than the infidelity of his wife. At the worst, her misconduct will only bring into the shelter of his home a child who grows up protected socially by her fraud; but, if _he_ choose to "spend his substance in riotous living," his wife and children may, while the law gives him exclusive right to their common property, be deserted, or driven from their homes, to make room for those who are the companions of his guilt. It is quite possible, it will be seen, therefore, to show another side to this matter, in no better light than that of expediency. One canton of Switzerland (the Canton Glarus) possesses laws in regard to such matters, in marked contrast to those of the whole civilized world. The consequence is, that the falsehood and crime so common elsewhere are here unknown.[38] "Perhaps it would be just," says Poynter on "Marriage and Divorce," in 1824,--"_perhaps_ it would be just, that where the husband violates the matrimonial compact, and the property originally belonged to the wife, he should give back the whole of it. Courts, however, have never gone that length." One would think, nevertheless, that husbands themselves might go that length, and that men who aspire to the credit of decency would be ashamed to eat the bread of her they have betrayed and wounded. How is it that they have deceived themselves from the beginning, and have fancied that God requires of woman a fidelity and purity that was not of the smallest consequence to themselves? In the late debate in Parliament on the New Divorce Bill, when a member objected to the introduction of a clause equalizing the relief of divorce to both sexes, he asked, "If this clause were adopted, I should like to know how many married men there would be in this house?" He was answered by shouts of laughter.