Note 210 — XVI MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE UNDER ROMAN AND ENGLISH LAW

1 Q. B. p. 671 (in the Court of Appeal). The judgements are instructive. The Master of the Rolls goes so far as to doubt whether the husband ever had a legal power of correction, a curious instance of the way in which the sentiment of a later time sometimes tries to force upon the language of an older time a non-natural meaning, the new sentiment being one which the older time would have failed to understand. It would have been simpler to admit that what may well have been law in the seventeenth century is not to be taken to be law now, manners and ideas having so completely changed as to render the old rules obsolete.