I explained the law in relation to dogs and tally-men as well as I could, and my friend was good enough to say when I had finished: "Well, I quite see you 'ad to make me pay as the law stands, but it don't seem to me just. If you can't 'ave a dorg, how can you keep them fellows out of the house?" That was more than I could answer. We parted friends--and there was, I think, a mutual feeling between us that the law of dogs in relation to tally-men was not all it should be. And many laws that are made for the best purposes are wrested from their beneficent uses by the wicked ones of the world and turned to the basest advantages. No legislation was hailed with greater delight by social reformers than the Married Women's Property Act, and yet one must admit that the fraudulent use of its provisions is a commonplace. I am not suggesting that it is mainly against the poor that it is misused, though I have known of cases under the Workmen's Compensation Act where goods were alleged to be "in the wife's name" after an award had been made against the husband, and many a poor tradesman and small worker is swindled by this allegation, the victim not having the money to test it in a court of law, and the result being in any case so gloriously uncertain. I am sorry to put matrimony among the flat-traps, but the use of the married status among the dishonest to prevent a successful litigant from obtaining the results of a judgment brings it within this category. Even the poorer classes themselves are beginning to make use of it as a kind of homestead law to protect their goods from execution. Much as I am in favour of seeing the poor man's home protected to a larger degree than it is at present I do not care to see it achieved at the expense of the character of the occupants. Any law that is a constant temptation to dishonesty is an evil, and there is no doubt that when the day comes for legal reform on a large scale, the various questions relating to the position of the married woman in the eye of the law will have to be considered. In many cases, of course, the reforms will be towards the enlargement of women's liberty, but in the matter of holding property it is clear that where a wife or a husband is tacitly allowing credit to be obtained on his or her appearance of property that property should be available to discharge the debt notwithstanding that it is claimed as the special property of one or the other. Menander, the Greek poet, in one of his comedies makes someone say, "To marry a wife, if we regard the truth, is an evil, but it is a necessary evil." If this was true in 300 B.C. it became more convincingly the truth in 1882 A.D., when the Married Women's Property Act became law, and the "peculiar gift of heaven" was welcomed by the unscrupulous trader as a statutory stay of execution. Since that day the Micawbers of this world have put all their available assets "in the wife's name."