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Certain significant observations may certainly be made upon this table. In the first place, the older States, the old thirteen, have, from the point of view of the conservative or divorce reformer, the best record. Only New Hampshire and Rhode Island, the latter for obvious reasons, stand low down in the column; the last State having about three hundred divorces as against Montana's five hundred.
The causes of this change of state are too numerous to be here adduced; but they shall be adduced in a future part of this work, when we come to explain in their order the causes of coldnesses, separations, and divorces; from which it will be seen, that with the generality at this day this image of conjugial love is so far abolished, and with the image the knowledge thereof, that its quality and even its existence are scarcely known.
The average moralist, but more particularly the clergy, seeing the fairly astonishing increase in divorce during the last decade, jump to the conclusion that family life is decadent and immorality flagrantly on the increase. They point to the indubitable fact that a century ago divorces were insignificant in number; and they infer that morality was then on a much higher level than it is now.
They plead and arrange their own affairs, usually without the assistance of a third party. As I have watched these marriages, I could not help but think that they turn out as happily as in any other section. Divorces, formerly so common, are now far less frequent, and when the people marry it is usually for life, most couples living together happily until parted by death.
In town records we find that divorces, though infrequent, still were occasionally given in other New England States; but the causes assigned therefor, to follow Madam Knight's example, need not be "Related by a Female Pen."
Study the causes back of divorces and separations, the brutal criminal causes aside, and one finds that usually they begin in trivial things, an irritating habit or an offensive opinion persisted in on the one side and not endured philosophically on the other; a petty selfishness indulged on the one side and not accepted humorously on the other, that is, the marriage is made or unmade by small, not great, things.
Here he comes again to be declared 'a man' by the priests, and consecrated to war and to good works; here before the solemn altar he leads his bride; and here too, if differences shall unhappily arise, he divorces her. And so on, down life's long pathway till the last mile is travelled, and he comes again armed indeed, and with dignity, but no longer a man.
He held that the polygamous relations which the Bible notes among the Israelites, even among saintly members of this people, must be explained either on the ground of a special dispensation of God for which we do not know the reason, or they must be regarded in the same light as Christ regarded the divorces among the Jews of His day, namely, as things which God permits among men because of their hardness of heart, and in order to prevent greater evils.
The manufacture of a case of the contrabandists of divorce is often such a marvel of unscrupulous audacity, that its very lawlessness constitutes in itself a kind of legal security. Another question naturally arises: What are such divorces worth? We reply that the whole business is unblushing fraud upon the dupes who are entrapped into patronizing the business.
"Some of the western states grant divorces on on much easier terms," he said politely. "If you care to wait, I will go into our library and look up the laws of those states." "I wish you would," answered Honora. "I don't think I could bear to spend three years in such in such an anomalous condition.
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