In the days when a great music-hall star was at the height of his fame, and had fortune at his feet, I saw him in his charming home with his boy and his two little girls. The star had been an actor, and was a man of culture and education. He had been separated from his wife for some years. She had left him in circumstances which entirely released him from any moral responsibility with regard to her. His early married life had been wrecked by this woman, who had become a dipsomaniac. After she left him he devoted himself to his three children. His delight was in them and in his home. One night I was passing the music hall at which he was starring. His brougham was waiting for him at the stage door, and a little crowd had gathered to see him come out. He came, and there was a cheer, and at that moment a dissipated-looking woman, with a battered bonnet on her untidy hair, with tom dress and bedraggled skirts, reeled forward and caught him by the arm. "Hulloa!" she shouted. "It's you, is it?" The "star" went very white as he looked into the drunken woman's face. He shook himself free from her clutch and stepped hurriedly into the brougham. The drunken woman yelled a volley of abuse after him as he drove away. Then she turned to the crowd and exclaimed-- "I'm his wife--his lawful wife--curse him!--and that's how he treats me." For ten years the terror of meeting this woman embittered the life of a great popular favourite. It was useless for him to give her money. It went in drink. He had once after she left him given her a home for herself. In six weeks she had sold every stick, and during that time she had twice been locked up and fined for being drank and creating a disturbance in the street. She would meet him outside a hall, then disappear for months, to turn up again and publicly claim him as her husband before a crowd of people. The woman died some years ago in a workhouse infirmary. In her last illness she said who she was, and the great music-hall star was communicated with. He bought a grave for her, and on the tombstone above it he had these words placed: "Sacred to the memory of ------ -----------, wife of ---------- -----------." Dead, he could acknowledge her. Living, his haunting terror was that he might meet her, and she might call him husband. In France, when the family fortune and the family honour are being imperilled by a member, a family council can be called, and can invoke the aid of the law to limit the powers of the offending individual. Here no such system exists. A man who has lost all moral control over himself may squander his substance and leave his children beggars. A young man succeeding to a considerable estate may get rid of it in insane extravagance in a year or two. A widow left with the control of her dead husband's fortune may embark on foolish speculations or become the dupe of swindlers and leave the sons and daughters of her dead husband without a farthing in the world.