Bigamy

“ The polygamy that is degrading or absurd under one roof assumes a different appearance when one considers it from the point of view of people whose habits of life do not centre upon an isolated home.
All the relations I have glanced at above do as a matter of fact exist to-day, but shamefully and shabbily, tainted with what seems to me an unmerited and unnecessary ignominy. The punishment for bigamy seems to me insane in its severity, contrasted as it is with our leniency to the common seducer. Better ruin a score of women, says the law, than marry two. ”

“ Bigamy is a crime. She is a bigamist. I’ve got to keep it quiet. We were married here; it’s in the register.... I cannot tell anyone she was not my wife. I’ll have to let it be thought that she deserted me—ran off with this—this chap we called her brother. ”

“ The law of which we are speaking is one which declares that certain criminal impediments to marriage, mentioning only some of them, shall not excuse a woman from being an adulteress, when she has been either 'married or betrothed before the holy mother, the church.' But bigamy is not an impediment in the sense in which that word is used canonically in respect to marriage. ”

“ With the cunning of latent insanity he had arranged his plans, counting on Pamela’s silence in respect to his bigamous marriage with her, utterly regardless of the stir which the scandal of his marriage with Blanche must create in circles where he was known to have a wife and children already. To a man in full possession of his faculties the impossibility of concealing the crime of bigamy would have been apparent, unless he fled the country and married under an assumed name. ”

“ Bigamy may be adduced as another instance: the heinousness of the offence is not in having more than one wife, but in the prospect of the children of the first marriage being left to be supported by the community. ”

“ Bigamy was forbidden in a law which forbade a man to "marrie too wifes which were both alive for anything that can appear otherwise at one time," which strikes one as more well-meaning than lucid. The husband must not beat his wife or even abuse her with angry words, while she, on the other hand, if she gave vent to "a curst and shrewish tongue" was in danger of the stocks or the ducking-stool. ”

“ You have been convicted of the offence of bigamy, that is to say, of marrying a woman while you had a wife still alive, though it is true she has deserted you and is living in adultery with another man. ”

“ Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's. ”

“ English law makes marriage far too easy. In addition to this alarming increase in divorce, a greater number of [92] deeds of separation have been drawn up in the last two years than in any preceding twenty-five; cases of bigamy have also become very frequent, by women as well as by men.
A stage has now been reached when the cry for reform must be listened to. Something has got to be done. The unhappiness and failure in many marriages looms before us a colossal, an unprecedented and menacing fact. Our eyes cannot any longer remain shut to the damning proofs which confront us from so many sides. ”

“ After all, there is nothing that you have told me that was not bound to come out. You couldn’t marry a man who is known to have a wife and family, without the whole story coming to light. As soon as the facts are known Arnott will have to take his trial on a charge of bigamy. ”

“ Counsel would again nervously agree with his lordship that his client had done wrong in deceiving the woman, but in three sentences he would have found another way round to the portraiture of the prisoner as all but a model for the young. Certainly, the great increase in the offence of bigamy proves at least the hollowness of all the talk about the growing indifference to the marriage tie. Whatever we may think of bigamists—and there are black sheep in every flock—the bigamist is manifestly a much-married man. He is a person, I should say, with the bump of domesticity excessively developed. ”

“ Bigamy is the crime of having two or more wives, and is also called polygamy. But bigamy literally signifies having two wives, and polygamy any number more than one. These words, in law, are applied also to women having two or more husbands. A person having a lawful husband or wife living, and marrying another person, is guilty of bigamy. An unmarried person, also, who shall marry the husband or wife of another, is punishable in like manner. ”

“ Among the Jews it is a sin to eat pork, but an English humorist writes you a delicious essay on Roast Pig. Bigamy is a sin in the whole of Europe but the south-eastern corner, and there it is a virtue, sanctioned by the laws of religion. Marrying your deceased wife's sister is a sin in England; four thousand years ago, in another part of the world, it was no sin at all; in fact, a gentleman of remarkable piety, whom God is said to have loved, married his wife's sister without waiting for a funeral. ”

“ That the man would have to undergo the punishment of bigamy in its severest form, there was no doubt;—but would law, and justice, and the prevailing desire for revenge, be able to get at him in such a way that he might be hung? ”

“ In the anxiety to attach odium to our system of marriage, our enemies call it bigamy, ignoring the fact that, according to our rules, a man who has one wife does not take another wife without the consent of the first wife; no advantage is taken of her by keeping her in ignorance. The new relationship has been entered into by common consent. There is no element of crime about this—that is, of the crime of bigamy. It is, as I have said the concealment that makes it a crime; it is the fact that both women are deceived and wronged by the act of the man. And such a man ought to be punished. ”

“ But for the information of such people, if there be any, let me say, their bigamy is deception and fraud and a breach of the marriage covenant; while our polygamy, as it is called, is the fulfilling of the marriage covenant, it is honorable and the fruits of it are good; theirs is done clandestinely, ours openly; we acknowledge ours, they repudiate theirs. They judge us from their own standpoint, and their eye being evil, of course they see nothing but evil in us. ”

“ We have no such mission. Further, if we were to proclaim the principle that they call polygamy, they could not obey it. We believe in celestial marriage, in celestial covenants, in men and women being united for time and for all eternity. Are we going to suffer a surrender of this point? No, never! No, never! We intend to be true to our covenants in time and in the eternities to come. They call it bigamy. What is a bigamist? A man who marries one wife promising to be true to her, and afterwards representing himself as an honorable man, marries another one and deceives both of them. ”

“ But you cannot deny that it is still the law that a man and woman may be married in one jurisdiction and adjudged guilty of adultery or bigamy in another; that the marriage tie is broken daily on the most frivolous grounds and with the most indecent haste ”

“ For example, in most of the United States of America bigamy, or the possession of two wives at a time, is a crime; whereas, in Salt Lake city, its rulers have twenty, and its men a dozen, if they like, and yet are esteemed saints, and really conduct themselves as if they had a clear claim to the title. ”

“ Therefore since irregularity does not result from bigamy except on account of a defect in the sacrament, it would seem that no irregularity attaches to bigamy of this kind.
Objection 2: Further, if a man has intercourse with a woman whom he has married in fact and not in law, he commits fornication if he has not a lawful wife, or adultery if he has. But a man does not become irregular by dividing his flesh among several women by fornication or adultery. ”

“ I do not deserve the former, I am aware; but I have certainly done nothing to make it necessary for me to claim the latter.”
“Perhaps you look upon bigamy as a very small offense.”
“But I have never committed bigamy, Gwendolyn. Indeed, until I saw you I never wanted even to commit matrimony.”
“Then who was it I saw in your house?”
“I have a crazy protégée in the village, whom I allow to wander about the park, as she is perfectly harmless. She has very strange delusions, and may have taken it into her head that she is married to me, and I am trying to keep her out of her rights. ”

“ To the public eye, the newly-married pair were contented with each other;—alas! it was because each feared an exposure to the nation. The king reproached himself that he had not fearlessly avowed the only wife of his affections; the queen, because she feared an explanation that the king was guilty of bigamy, and thereby her claim, as also that of her progeny, (if she should have any) would be known to be illegitimate. It appears as if the result of these reflections formed a basis for the misery of millions, and added to that number millions then unborn. ”

“ Now there is a defect in a sacrament when the entire signification of the sacrament is not found therein. And the sacrament of marriage signifies the union of Christ with the Church, which is the union of one with one. Therefore the perfect signification of the sacrament requires the husband to have only one wife, and the wife to have but one husband; and consequently bigamy, which does away with this, causes irregularity. And there are four kinds of bigamy: the first is when a man has several lawful wives successively ”

“ The King and Queen (proceeds the review) insist upon ignoring the marriage, and try to compel their son to commit bigamy by marrying a woman of the royal caste. The Prince, however—and in this Marie Corelli departs from the old legend which appears to have suggested this episode—has an unconquerable repugnance to the demand that he should commit bigamy for the good of the State. ”

“ For bigamy, according to the Great Law, whosoever shall be "Convicted of having two wives or two husbands, att one and the same time shall be imprisoned all their Lifetime in the House of Correction, at hard labour, to the behoof of the former wife and children, or the former husband and children." ”

“ In France, Italy, and Spain, the infamous laws not only encouraging but actually enforcing civil marriage are sapping the foundations of society; and in England, a country hitherto held as a model for its conjugal and homely tendencies, the tenets of “free-love” are making giant inroads into social life, and leavening the mass of everyday literature. [pg 784] Bigamy and divorce are almost worn-out sensations ”

“ In common bigamy the first marriage is studiously concealed by the party contemplating the second marriage. A man represents himself to a lady as a bachelor, and under false pretences and fraud obtains possession of her person. Soon she discovers that she has been betrayed, deceived, degraded,—the sense of shame and sorrow following producing indescribable misery. Nor has it been less productive of evil to the first wife. ”

“ HONORABLE POLYGAMY Turning now from the parental to the conjugal sphere we shall find further interesting instances showing How Sentiments Change and Grow. The monogamous sentiment—the feeling that a man and his wife belong to each other exclusively—is now so strong that a person who commits bigamy not only perpetrates a crime for which the courts may imprison him for five years, but becomes a social outcast with whom respectable people will have nothing more to do. ”

“ He is a breaker of covenants. A polygamist does not do that. Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon did not perpetrate such infamies. Nor do we. Bigamy is an institution of a perverted Christianity and not ours. We make covenants with our wives, and we will be true to them and they to us in time and in eternity. ”

“ Of this however I knew nothing, till one day, while I was at the hotel, I was suddenly arrested for bigamy. But I was used to this kind of arrest by this time, and I went before the magistrate with my mind made up that I must suffer again for my matrimonial monomania. ”

“ Under the new facilities for divorce offered to the London poor, a poor woman recently obtained a decree nisi for divorce against her husband, who had often covered her body with bruises, infected her with a dangerous disease, and committed bigamy. By this bigamous marriage the husband had ten illegitimate children. ”

“ The absolute grounds are adultery, bigamy, sodomy, an attempt against the petitioner’s life or wilful desertion. The relative grounds are (a) such grave breach of marital duty or dishonourable or immoral conduct as would disturb the marital relation to such an extent that the marriage could not reasonably be expected to continue; (b) insanity, continued for more than three years during the marriage, and of so severe a nature that intellectual community between the parties has ceased and is not likely to be re-established. ”

“ With regard to marriage, the foundation of society, so unguarded is he, that, besides destroying its sacramental character, he brushes aside the ecclesiastical impediments of marriage as mere man-made inventions, and, speaking of divorce based on these laws, he declares that to him bigamy is preferable. ”