IX PROBLEMS OF MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE A CAPTURED wife or a purchased wife can have little authoritative to say concerning her condition in marriage or the terms of her dismissal or her escape from the marriage bond, provided she may be dismissed or is allowed to escape. A wholly subject woman can have no legal power to determine who shall represent the authority of the family which hands her from one guardian to another. There can be, therefore, no problems of marriage and divorce, in the sense in which we now use the words, until there is a possibility of a marriage contract legally defined and binding alike on husbands and on wives; and there can be no marriage contract until women have at least a few personal rights secured to them by law and custom. The rise of the marriage contract, therefore, with its recognition of some power of personal choice and some right of individual liberty accorded to women, is the suggestive clue to the course of social evolution which in any given era outlines the terms of legal marriage. The rise of the marriage contract is itself, however, simply one element in the slow movement of society toward the recognition of contract کے powers in general, and the emergence of women from a perpetual legal minority. Problems of marriage and divorce, therefore, are and must be parts of the whole problem of the just and useful position of women in society. This is the reason why ultra opponents of "Women's Rights" always and instinctively relate the greater freedom of women to domestic disaster; and this is also the reason why the ultra proponents of "Women's Rights" as instinctively begin their demand for larger sharing of the powers and obligations of social life by women with some radical attack upon that family order which rests upon the legal despotism of the husband and father. There is to-day a feeling of almost hysterical alarm regarding the present conditions of family life. The demonstrable and large increase of divorces throughout Christendom, the weakening of family ties by reason of changed economic, educational and social conditions which secure to minor children as well as to wives great freedom of choice and liberty of action, give deep concern to all, and awaken moral terror in many. No one, however, who really believes that we should not return to the absolute control of women by men, and to the harem and the zenana as the ideal home, need be in fear of any unique domestic catastrophe. Most of us have come to believe that marriage and the family are social institutions, rising in answer to social needs and changing in accordance with general social evolution, and at no time to be studied as isolated facts, but rather always as related parts of the whole process of social development. All who believe in this manner should approach the problems of marriage and divorce with clear minds and sunny tempers, with breadth of vision and with balanced judgment. Such students at least can remember, and with satisfaction, that the statistics of divorce, which so often provoke pessimism respecting our American family life, must be read in connection with other statistics which prove a progressively higher average of just and noble family relationship among those who do not become divorced. The facts of scandalous proceedings in the "smart set" should never blind the judicious to those other facts which show that the "malefactors of great wealth" are few, and the favored of fortune who behave like silly and wicked youth are a small minority. Admitting, however, the distinct increase in divorces relative to population, and accepting it as an evil in that which it indicates as well as in that which it proves, there must also be confessed a considerable and regrettable trend of modern life in the direction of the instability of the family. The love of change and the impatience of control among our youth; the easy movement of population which makes "home" often but an attachment to the moving-van; the flexible yet complicated social arrangements which make it easy to shirk individual responsibility; the economic pressure, intensified by the desire so painfully common to live more luxuriously than one can afford; the widespread results of invention which release many from drudgery before they are fitted for skilled labor; the free public education which enables many to appropriate the super ficial fruits of culture before they have attained moral discrimination in their efficient use for the higher purposes of life-all these and many more elements of our rapidly changing civilization tend to make the home and all its interests subject to unprecedented disturbance from the many-sided life without. Also we must give serious attention to the fact that in the United States there is great divergence of inherited standards, laws and customs regarding the basis of marriage, the righteousness or wickedness of possible divorce and the propriety or impropriety of remarriage after domestic changes, which confuses the matter. For want of a clear ideal of religious values and social demands involved, the rule of personal desire and individual idiosyncrasy has too great predominance. Here, where ethical doctors disagree and moral teachers widely differ, youth makes its ideal an exalta tion of romance in marriage choices; and mature years demands the right of the most extreme individualism. The sense of intellectual freedom to believe what one wishes, and the "will to believe" what is most pleasant and seems most easy to realize in action, often join to make individual preference the only rule of life. exaltał We have in our marriage laws and customs reminiscences in a specific manner of the three main channels of thought and life which make up what we call Christian civilization. We have first the Jewish ideal of marriage, which has come to us with our special religious inheritance. This is an ideal which includes a belief in the rightful and proper subjection of women to men, but exacts of men protection for women. It elevates the conception of marriage to a plane of purity I and faithfulness superior alike to celibacy and to unchastity; but includes divorce, easy for men to obtain, difficult for women; yet justifiable for both, provided the terms of separation and of possible remarriage are defined by the wisdom of the law as interpreted by rabbis. We have also a large inherited influence from the Roman law which has given the legal basis of all our later statutes and which has modified all tribal customs of the Germanic peoples. In Roman marriage, the patrician form, religious and indissoluble, and the plebeian form, secular and legally terminable, but carefully guarded as a legal contract, both hold firmly respect for family autonomy as well as the subordination of caprice to justice and right. These elements of the sacred and the secular marriage of Roman law are retained in some form in our present civilization. We have inherited also another potent influence upon the domestic order, one which is in our blood more than in our religion or our law, namely the Anglo-Saxon love of personal liberty and sense of individual rights; that which first gave to women a voice in the disposition of their own persons, and initiated for our special social order a proud restraint upon the tendency of the family to sacrifice to its own autonomy the happiness and well-being of its members. These varied ideals and elements of custom and law were all incorporated by Latin Christianity into its control of marriage, although all were modified and changed in emphasis. The Church adopted the high demand for faithfulness in the marriage tie, the subordination of woman to |