Can a husband open his wife's letters? That would depend, many would say,
upon what kind of a husband he is. But it cannot be put aside in that
flippant manner, for it is a legal right that is in question, and it has
recently been decided in a Paris tribunal that the husband has the right
to open the letters addressed to his wife. Of course in America an appeal
would instantly be taken from this decision, and perhaps by husbands
themselves; for in this world rights are becoming so impartially
distributed that this privilege granted to the husband might at once be
extended to the wife, and she would read all his business correspondence,
and his business is sometimes various and complicated. The Paris decision
must be based upon the familiar formula that man and wife are one, and
that that one is the husband. If a man has the right to read all the
letters written to his wife, being his property by reason of his
ownership of her, why may he not have a legal right to know all that is
said to her? The question is not whether a wife ought to receive letters
that her husband may not read, or listen to talk that he may not hear,
but whether he has a sort of lordship that gives him privileges which she
does not enjoy. In our modern notion of marriage, which is getting itself
expressed in statute law, marriage is supposed to rest on mutual trust
and mutual rights. In theory the husband and wife are still one, and
there can nothing come into the life of one that is not shared by the
other; in fact, if the marriage is perfect and the trust absolute, the
personality of each is respected by the other, and each is freely the
judge of what shall be contributed to the common confidence; and if there
are any concealments, it is well believed that they are for the mutual
good. If every one were as perfect in the marriage relation as those who
are reading these lines, the question of the wife's letters would never
arise. The man, trusting his wife, would not care to pry into any little
secrets his wife might have, or bother himself about her correspondence;
he would know, indeed, that if he had lost her real affection, a
surveillance of her letters could not restore it.
Perhaps it is a modern notion that marriage is a union of trust and not
of suspicion, of expectation of faithfulness the more there is freedom.
At any rate, the tendency, notwithstanding the French decision, is away
from the common-law suspicion and tyranny towards a higher trust in an
enlarged freedom. And it is certain that the rights cannot all be on one
side and the duties on the other. If the husband legally may compel his
wife to show him her letters, the courts will before long grant the same
privilege to the wife. But, without pressing this point, we hold strongly
to the sacredness of correspondence. The letters one receives are in one
sense not his own. They contain the confessions of another soul, the
confidences of another mind, that would be rudely treated if given any
sort of publicity. And while husband and wife are one to each other, they
are two in the eyes of other people, and it may well happen that a friend
will desire to impart something to a discreet woman which she would not
intrust to the babbling husband of that woman. Every life must have its
own privacy and its own place of retirement. The letter is of all things
the most personal and intimate thing. Its bloom is gone when another eye
sees it before the one for which it was intended. Its aroma all escapes
when it is first opened by another person. One might as well wear
second-hand clothing as get a second-hand letter. Here, then, is a sacred
right that ought to be respected, and can be respected without any injury
to domestic life. The habit in some families for the members of it to
show each other's letters is a most disenchanting one. It is just in the
family, between persons most intimate, that these delicacies of
consideration for the privacy of each ought to be most respected. No one
can estimate probably how much of the refinement, of the delicacy of
feeling, has been lost to the world by the introduction of the
postal-card. Anything written on a postal-card has no personality; it is
banal, and has as little power of charming any one who receives it as an
advertisement in the newspaper. It is not simply the cheapness of the
communication that is vulgar, but the publicity of it. One may have
perhaps only a cent's worth of affection to send, but it seems worth much
more when enclosed in an envelope. We have no doubt, then, that on
general principles the French decision is a mistake, and that it tends
rather to vulgarize than to retain the purity and delicacy of the
marriage relation. And the judges, so long even as men only occupy the
bench, will no doubt reverse it when the logical march of events forces
upon them the question whether the wife may open her husband's letters.