s amusing to poke fun at those who are sensible
enough to wish to make lunacy a sufficient ground for divorce. 'The
process' he says, 'might begin by releasing somebody from a homicidal
maniac and end by dealing with a rather dull conversationalist.' He
might have added, to make the joke complete, or from some one who
snores, or keeps cats, or reads Bernard Shaw.

'To put it roughly,' says Chesterton, 'we are prepared in some cases to
listen to a man who complains of having a wife. But we are not prepared
to listen at such length to the same man when he comes back and
complains that he has not got a wife. In a word, divorce is a
controversy about remarriage; or, rather, about whether it is marriage
at all.' To a certain extent Chesterton is right when he says that the
controversy about divorce is really about remarriage, but what he
forgets is, that for the hundreds who want divorce to be remarried,
there are thousands who want it to be unmarried. The reason a man
complains of having a wife is, of course, often that he prefers a
mistress; but it is equally true that another cause for complaint is
that his wife has for him none of the recognized attributes of the
normal state of wifehood.

I have always understood that in some sense Chesterton was a journalist
of the kind who is rather hard on journalism, but I did not know until I
read this book on divorce that he so little understood newspapers and
their writers. Commenting on the fact that the Press is sensible enough
to use divorce as a news item, he says: 'The newspapers are full of an
astonishing hilarity about the rapidity with which hundreds of thousands
of human families are being broken up by the lawyers; and about the
undisguised haste of the "hustling" judges who carry on the work.' I
wonder if Mr. Chesterton ever reads the leaders of certain papers,
leaders which never fail to regret the enormous amount of divorce there
is. If it be true that there is a great deal of news of divorce in the
Press, it is because the Press does not give news of an imaginary world
that is a Utopia, but of the dear old muddle-headed world as it is. Does
Chesterton fail to see that if the newspapers did not report the Divorce
Courts, the numbers of cases would increase from thousands to millions.
It is useless Chesterton sighing that lawyers have become breakers of
families; they have also become restrainers of suicide. If the judges
hustle, it is because they are sensible enough