ation,
particularly in the code States, in California, New York, and the West
generally, is based upon the view that marriage is a simple contract,
whence results the obvious corollary that it may be dissolved at any
time by mutual consent. No State has thus far followed the decision
to this logical end, on the pretended assumption that the rights of
children are concerned; but the rights of children might as well
be conserved upon a voluntary divorce as after a scandalous court
proceeding. One possible view is that the church should set its own
standard, and the state its own standard, even to the extreme of not
regulating the matter at all except by ordinary laws of contract and
laws for the record of marriages and divorces and for the custody,
guardianship, support, and education of children, which would include
the presumption of paternity pending an undissolved marriage, but all
divorces to be by mutual consent. It is evident to any careful student
of our legislation that we would be rapidly approaching this view
but for the conservative influence of Massachusetts, Connecticut,
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the South, and but for the efforts of
most of the churches and the divorce reform societies. Which influence
will prove more powerful in the end it is not possible to predict.

Socialists urge that the institution of marriage is bound up with that
of private property. There is little doubt that the women's suffrage
movement tends to socialism, and, also, paradoxical as it may at first
seem, to lax marriage laws and easy divorces. "The single standard
of morality" offered by all advanced women's-rights advocates will
necessarily be a levelling down, not a levelling up; and in a society
where the life of the ordinary young woman _is_ that which at least
_was_ that of the ordinary young man about town, it is hardly likely
that there will be any stricter legislation. Where a majority of young
women live alone and earn their living, the old order must change.

Divorce, it should be known, is a modern institution; that is, divorce
by the secular courts. Such divorce as the Roman Church recognized, or
was granted by act of Parliament, was the only divorce existing down
to the year 1642, when one Hannah Huish was divorced in Connecticut by
the General Court, "with liberty to marry again as God may grant her
opportunity," and about that time the Colony of Massachusetts Bay
enacted the first law (with the possible except