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to make family life more stable, and more socially helpful. Men and
women must be made competent to self-control, and steadied with a
sense of obligation to others, and animated by an ideal of
faithfulness to contract, and of devotion to securing mutual rights in
a mutual plan of life together. Such education for character, must be
our chief dependence in efforts to lessen divorces, as in the effort
to do away with all social evils. There is no magic in marriage, there
is no magic even in parenthood, to make weak, and selfish and
superficial and ignorant and stupid and despotic people into guardians
of the best interests of home. A man or a woman is successful in the
family order, only on the same basis as is demanded in all other
relations of life, the basis of justice, good sense, right feeling,
and an honest effort to realize high ideals.

=Helps Toward Family Unity.=--What remains for society to do, after
general moral training has worked its full service of individual
preparation for good intent and wise choices and competent mastery of
family arrangements, must be done or attempted on the basis rather of
helps toward permanence, than of prohibition of release from marriage
mistakes and wrongs.

We have left undone much we should have done to make it easier for
young people to find their true mates, to start right in married life,
and to bear the burdens of parenthood without stumbling on the way.
Let us not add mistakenly to the duties left undone the attempt to do
things we should not, namely, to overbear instead of aiding the
personal life.

There is nothing that works more tragedy of suffering than broken vows
in marriage, whether the fact of the actual separation be publicly
acknowledged or not. How many a disillusioned man or woman has felt
with the poet:

"To look upon the face of a dead friend
Is hard; but there is deeper woe--
To look upon our friendship lying dead
While we live on, and eat, and sleep--
Mere bodies from which all the soul has fled,
And that dead thing year after year to keep
Locked in cold silence on its dreamless bed."

=Shall Society Favor the Remarriage of Divorced Persons?=--Now that
the moral sense of most people allows another trial on Love's Rialto,
there are many individuals who can leave "that dead thing" to find its
own grave, and in the light of some new and dearer affection go on to
a renewed promise and joy of life. Can we think th