investigate the causes for the backwardness of school children, why so
many "failed to pass" and were "retarded" in the march from grade to
grade in the elementary classes, the first inquiry took no note of the
exactions of the grade standards. All who failed to move on at the
scheduled moment for "promotion," in any school examined, were listed
as "backward." Later, it occurred to the investigators, that the first
thing to find out was whether or not a given grade standard was one
that true pedagogy would approve, and second, whether there was a
serious discrepancy in that grade standard between the different
schools from which the children came for examination.

In much the same way the first inquiries as to the evil of frequent
divorce seemed to take for granted that all who sought divorce were in
circumstances that might have been socially and usefully continued
within the marriage bond. We know better now. We know that the first
question to ask about a broken family is: What was its condition
before the break? Did justice, and a fair estimate of the quality of
the union and its effects upon the man and the woman involved, and
their children, demand that the family hold or be held together, or
was there a condition that made society more interested in the ending
than in the continuance of that union?

If, as is beginning to be understood, it is not for the interest of
society that men and women should marry who are so physically
diseased, or mentally defective, or morally perverted as to make them
injurious members of a family circle, is it not as clear that in many
cases such persons when married are not helpful members of any family;
and if so, again, is it not clear that there is justification in
social need itself for the removal of such persons from the family
circle they have already polluted or injured in vital ways, to prevent
their doing more harm to family life?

Whatever may be thought by many who view all divorce with horror,
there is a tendency within that movement toward free divorce, toward
the freeing of the currents of generative life from evil influence,
from despotism, from degenerative tendencies, and from the worst forms
of social wrong-doing. There is, also, of course, in that movement, a
testimony which should make all earnest lovers of their kind learn
how to urge socially therapeutic treatment, a testimony to human
weakness, to a lack of the sense of responsibility, to a love of
persona