THERE are probably a million women in this land living lives of legalized prostitution; who conceive children in hate of husbands they abhor, bring them forth in bitterness of spirit to be reared in an atmosphere of discord — off-spring stamped from their very inception with the die of the criminal or the courtesan. Yet the purists and pietists "view with alarm" the vast increase in the number of divorces; are weeping and wailing because women will not suffer in silence a bondage that is bestial — a prostitution preëminently the worst in the world, that of loveless marriage. Day and night the doleful jeremiad goes up from these pious pharisees that the laxity of American divorce laws is imperiling the morals of the people, sapping the home and threatening to topple our entire system into ruin irremediable.

       And what remedy do they propose? Uniform divorce laws and a reduction of the number of causes for which marital bonds may be legally broken. This would be equiv- alent to enacting a law that people should not summon a physician except in certain dire exigencies. Those who would elevate public morals by repressing legal separations appear to consider lax divorce laws the cause rather than the result of marital misery. They are pounding away vigorously at the shadow, leaving the substance untouched.

       These foolish philosophers appear to be harboring the hallucination that where divorce is not difficult, husbands and wives are taken on trial; that matches are made just for amusement or to gratify a prurient passion, and that women pretending to respectability change their lawful companions much as men of the world do their mistresses; also that where it is next to impossible to break the marriage bond it is regarded with greater veneration and entered into with much greater caution. Doubtless a few old roués and adventuresses might make a business of marrying if divorce could be had for the asking, but it is an insult to the better class of American women to suggest that any law could so demoralize them that they would deliberately wed men with whom they did not expect to pass their lives.

       Wedlock is holy only where there exists mutual love and respect. Such unions do not need to be reinforced by strict marriage laws. They mean much more than a "civil contract"; they mean devotion unto death, and would stand unshaken if every law known to man should perish from the earth. Only such unions should endure. All others are unholy and unclean — civil contracts to commit a crime against posterity — and should be dissolved. Those who protest so bitterly against divorce, who would compel people to live together after love has flown, appear to think the marriage ceremony a thaumaturgic incantation which sanctifies debauchery, a modern correlative of the ancient rites of Bacchus.

       That eminent statistician, Hon. Carroll D. Wright, has recently stated that during the twenty years ending with 1886, there were granted in the United States 328,716 decrees for divorce; that the number in 1867 was 9,937 as against 25,535 in 1886, being an increase of nearly 157 per cent., while the population of the country increased during the same period only about 60 per cent. Mr. Wright added, almost unnecessarily one would think, that "the divorce statistics do not fully indicate or measure the mar- ital infelicity or social misery of the country; they only measure the misery which can no longer abide conditions, and when parties have the courage to publicly seek re- lease from demoralizing burdens."

       Those words in quotation are worthy serious study. "When they have the courage" — to go into court and recite their grievances, to lay bare their torn hearts to the world, to be badgered and baited by shyster lawyers, made the cynosure of the rabble, and have the degradation and despair which they would fain hide from their dearest friends, caught up by a prurient press and heralded to the four winds of Heaven! Only people who have the courage can stand that kind of thing, can hope for legal relief from bonds that make life a burden. And what kind of people possess this courage? Those who least deserve relief — brazen women and brutish men. How can a high-bred gentleman go into court and brand the wife to whom he poured the whole wealth of his heart, as a wanton — confess himself that most pitiable of all objects, a cuckold? If they have children, how can he deliberately cloud their whole lives? How can a modest, sensitive woman go before a rabble and rehearse the brutal scenes that have made her home a hell? No, they cannot do it; they must suffer in silence or quietly depart, leaving their unworthy mates to explain the separation as their interest or maliciousness may suggest.

       The number of divorces has indeed become appalling: but this is but a partial suppuration of the sore. It argues, not that divorce laws are too lax, but that society is rotten. Marital misery cannot be decreased by denying it relief. If a woman does not love and honor her husband above all other men, she might as well be in a brothel as compelled to share his bed. If a man does not love his wife, happiness cannot abide in that home. People who do not desire to live together should be allowed to legally separate without being compelled to go into court with their grievances. It is a matter which they alone are competent to wisely decide. They have entered into a "civil contract" to make each other happy. If either wishes to annul that contract it is prima facie evidence that it has not been fulfilled, is void, and should be so pronounced by the courts.

       To guard against hasty and ill-considered action the law might provide that application for divorce be followed by a separation of six months, during which period the marital relations would be suspended in law and in fact. At the expiration of that period, an application that the divorce be made absolute should be followed by a decree to that effect, proper provision made for the children, if any, resulting from the union. Unquestionably such a régime would increase the number of divorces. More people would "have the courage" to seek separation from uncongenial mates if they did not have to go into court with a lingering tale of woe — to explain to all Christendom, through the columns of a sensation-seeking, garbage-grabbing press, why said mates were to them a source of misery. It would afford relief to many cultured gentlemen and refined ladies to whom our present barbarous system of procedure offers only a cure infinitely worse than the complaint.

       The objections that libertines would marry young ladies with deliberate intent to secure divorces is not without weight; but we cannot well condemn those already in the Slough of Despond to remain there because to help them out will afford a few fools golden opportunity to fall in. With the law as suggested, young ladies really deserving our consideration would not be so ready to contract hasty marriages with men of whom they knew little. As matters now stand many incautious women are victimized by adventurers who do not hestitate to marry as often as opportunity offers.

       While we may properly look to law-reform to relieve much of the marital misery now existing, we should strive to prevent, rather than to provide a panacea for this ill in the future. The church might profitably allow the heathen a holiday and devote a little more of its energies to teaching the American people that marriage is more than a "civil contract" that may be entered into much as one does into a contract for a car-load of cotton or a pound of putty. It should set its face like flint against "marriages of convenience"; should launch some of its thunderbolts it is now wasting on the heads of harmless agnostics, at those pious people who teach their daughters that the chief end and aim of their lives must be to marry money instead of men. Our public schools should not waste quite so much time ascertaining the number of bones in the caudal appendages of the ichthyosaurus, or determining just when the paleozoic gave place to the mesozoic, and that in turn was tumbled into the unlamented erstwhile by the cenozoic time; but should devote an hour occasionally to teaching the rising generation something of the sacredness of Lamartine's trinity — the trinity of the father, mother and child.

       That is the only hope for the future. Laws cannot make a people virtuous or happy. They cannot prevent mistakes in marriages. They cannot guard the sanctity of the home.

(THE END)