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WHY MEN ARE HANGED
the justification would disappear by the time his bride would be a woman. She was hardly ten at the time of their marriage. When she was twenty, the man was well over sixty. He naturally liked having a young wife-to cook his food and otherwise look after him. But a healthy young woman of twenty wants somcthing more out of marital relations. The cause of the eventually committed crime and its punishment originated in that divergence of thc natural necds of two people unite] inscparably.
The old man could not be held responsible for marrying a girl of ten. He was a simple villager ; where could he get a grown-up bride in the village ? Presumably, he would have preferre: a mature woman for the consideration of domestic management, if not for more intimate reason. However, he had to take what was availablc, lik: everybody, and wait. Only, meanwhile, he grew old, less capable of performing his marital duty to the satisfaction of the other party concerned, than of demanding his due which was rather of servile than marital nature.
The result was that the young wife began to carry on with some village beau. Conventionally, she deviated from the path of virtue,-sexual faithfulness to the husband. If the husband was, for some reason or other, in this particular case, for advanced age, not capable of retaining the faithfulness on the part of the wife, the latter
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