A

man in the domestic life, and the ethical significance of the family order which the Jewish religion inculcated. It rejected Jewish divorce and lowered the rank of marital virtue by placing celibacy above it in the scale of spiritual excellence. The Church accepted as its own standard the patrician form of Roman marriage as a religious sacrament, indissoluble save by death, and making second marriages even after such bereavement rather shameful concessions to human weakness. large trace, however, of the plebeian form of secular regulation is to be found in the history of all Christian nations; and Protestant Christianity restored the State to its superior control over marriage. The trend of all laws, customs and moral reforms in Christendom, especially in Protestant Christendom, has been toward a wider and deeper realization of the Germanic respect for womanhood and the Anglo-Saxon forms of marriage, after the right of contract was recognized and the social value of the wife in part estimated. Especially has Christian civilization appropriated the Germanic idea that a woman has some right to refuse to marry a hated or disliked man, and that youth has a right to selective love and its fruitage in a chosen union of the sexes.

To-day these varied reminiscences of our past mixed inheritance give us disagreements even in the fundamentals of ethical ideals in marriage; and often the friction that we develop in discussion dates back to our composite union of national ideals in the melting pot of early Christianity.

Wherever and whenever the rights of women are

recognized as those belonging to all human beings alike, there and then arise problems of marriage and divorce. For there and then marriage becomes a contract, and a contract can be broken for the same reasons that a contract may be made, namely, the good of the parties involved. The difficulties inhering in the adjustment of the domestic order to

"Two heads in council,
Two beside the hearth,

Two in the tangled business of the world" 1

are identical with the difficulties that inhere in democracy as a general social movement. Despotism is easy if you can secure a despot capable of holding his place. All else is a matter of adjustment to justice and right; and all such adjustment is difficult. In the midst of the confusion of ideal and action one thing is sure; namely, that women in the new freedom that has come to them in the last hundred years of Christian civilization will not longer endure the unspeakable indignities and the hopeless suffering which many of them have been compelled to endure in the past. That last outrage upon a chaste wife and a faithful mother, enforced physical union with a husband and father whose touch is pollution and whose heritage to his children is disease and death, will less and less be tolerated by individual or by social morality. In so far as greater freedom in divorce is one effect of the refusal of women to sustain marital relations with unfit men -and it is very largely that to-day-it is a movement 1 Alfred Tennyson, The Princess.

(Per

for the benefit and not for the injury of the family. Permanent and legal separation in such cases is now seen by most enlightened people to be both individually just and socially necessary. Whether such separation shall include remarriage of either or both parties is still a moot question in morals. The tendency, however, in all fields of ethical thought is away from "eternal punishment" and in the direction of self-recovery and of trying life experiments over again in the hope of a better outcome. It is likely that marriage and divorce will prove no exception to this hopeful tendency. Moreover, so far as the testimony of actual life is valid as against theories only, the countries where no re-marriage is allowed show a lower standard of marital faithfulness, of child-care and of true culture of the moral nature in the relationship of the family group, than is shown in those countries that grant for serious causes absolute divorce with full freedom for re-marriage.

That all divorces now obtained are for serious reasons, however, no one dare affirm. The most harmful element in the problem both in its personal and in its social aspects is the fact that selfishness, superficial and trivial causes of pique, of wounded vanity, of rash and childish whim, of even the mere suggestive power of newspaper scandals, may lead to a hasty and unnecessary termination of that most important of all human relationships, the marriage upon which the home is builded. The special need, however, even at this danger-point, is not to focus attention, as is usually done, upon evils to be avoided in divorce laws and

B

their operation. What is needed most is studious and practical devotion to constructive social measures that may be adopted for aid to those in marital difficulty, and for the prevention of those social and personal conditions which lead to marital difficulty. It is high time we began to work for the lessening of causes of divorce, for relief in family distress and misery, for helpful measures of discipline through recognized and adequate agencies for all who need an external conscience and an outside judgment to make a success of their married life. Not only is it true that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but it is also equally true that a pound of help at the right time and in the right way to weak and ignorant and wayward people is worth a ton of prohibition. What many people need most is not to be forbidden a divorce, but to be helped radically in their lives and in their circumstances to a position where they will not want a divorce.

In this connection we must consider the fact that our own is the first form of civilization that has tried in any large way the experiment of placing the entire burden of securing the success of marriage and the family life upon the characters and capacities of two persons. In primitive social orders, and in the older civilizations, each married pair and their children were sustained and disciplined and in greater or less degree controlled by the collective family order in which they lived. Now, we trust two people in early youth, undisciplined, undeveloped, perhaps deficient in mental, moral, physical or economic power, to marry as they

will; bear children or not without let or hindrance; take care of their children or not as seems desirable or possible to them; separate with ease, with or without legal procedure-and the burden of all the failures in marriage, parenthood and the family relationship is placed upon society as a whole. The consequences of the many failures that thus result have brought all thoughtful persons to the point where they see clearly that society, which in its social service is called upon to take care of failures, must assume a social control and discipline that will reduce those failures to the minimum. This means that we must come to an agreement about the method and extent of such social control of the present individualistic marriage as shall be just to persons and helpful to the social order.

The first question to be raised and answered in the effort to reach such an agreement is this: What force in modern society is adequate and suitable as the agency of such social control of the individualistic marriage in the interests of social welfare? The answer seems clear to many of us. The modern State is the only adequate and suitable agency for efficient social control of marriage. The old tyranny of tribal custom is gone; it will not return. The unquestioned despotism of the patriarchate is no more-and where is the sane person who would desire its revival? The family bond of blood relationship, which used to place all domestic responsibility in a "family council" with an acknowledged head, is already stretched to cover so wide an area of personal choice that it cannot hold firm against unsafe or unwise choices; and the ten