A HIDEOUS TRADE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 3365, 18 November 1872, Page 3

A HIDEOUS TRADE.

(Dotty Neim.)

A hideous trade has grown up around the Divorce Court. That Court deals with a class of offences which direct evidence of an honest and legitimate character is least likely to affect, and in which dishonest evidence is most difficult of refutation. Ifc is, perhaps, alao the only judicial tribunal in which the person who stands in the character of defendant can escape a deserved sentence by retaliating upon the accuHcr with a charge of a similar nature. Let us take a suppositions, but only too probable, case as an illustration. A hesband seekaa divorce from a guilty wife. The woman is conscious that she cannot dispute the evidence of her guilt. But she can evade part of the consequences by charging her husband with vice of the same kind. To prove this, she has only to seek among the most irresponsible and conscienceless class in the community, the wretched race known euphemistically aa *' unfortunate women," until she finds two or three who'will be willing to sustain by their personal testimony the unfounded charge. In many cases the accused husband has absolutely no reply to tins testimony but his personal dental of the charge y and of course, the chances of cross-examination. If he has ever taken an hour's walk through London at night, unaccompanied by a witness of his actions, he is almost entirely at the mercy of this sort of professional perjury. There have been cascss, indeed, where by a happy chance the man thus accused was able to give the most conclusive evidence of the falsehood of the accuiation. Ho was able to show that he was not, and could not have beeu, at the places and at times when the offences wore alleged to have been committed. But it is evident that the temptation to perjury of this kind is something terrible to contemplate. Again, a bad man who is tired of his wife and wants to get rid of her, employs spies -not even of the partly responsible " private detective" class—to watch all her movements. Let her but converse for a quarter of an hour with any male visitor in her drawing* room, and the spy, ready for perjury, has all that he or she requires. There was a remarkable case a short time ago, in which infamous witnesses were found to swear point-blank that they had seen what, fortunately for those incriminated, it was proved that they could not have seen, and never had token place. In this latter case it was the jealousy of a wife, not a husband, which unconsciously suggested to volunteer perjurers the possibility of making money by feeding her delusion. But the cases are far more common in which a husband actually sets on the spies, who, failing to find the evidence he desires, are ready to meet the occasion by inventing it. There have been instances—only too many —when the zeal of the eager witnesses has taxed itself to endeavour actually to entrap the victim into the commission of the offence which they were afterwards to expose in open court. It is not long since there catno before the Divorce Court a case in which an indiscreet and unhappy woman was thus surrounded by a whole gang of conspirators, who, not content with having deluded and betrayed her to disgrace, actually added a string of superfluous perjuries, in the hope of thereby making their abominable work more satisfactory and complete.