ainst and punished in the offspring.

* * * * *

Men who make laws have forever to watch most closely and dance
attendance on Nature. Laws which fly in the face of Nature are gently
waived or conveniently forgotten. Should Chief Justice Fuller issue an
injunction restraining all men from coming within a quarter of a mile of
a woman, on penalty of death, we would all place ourselves in contempt
in an hour; and should the army try to enforce the order, we would
smother Justice Fuller in his wool-sack and hang his effigy on a
sour-apple tree. Law isn't worth the paper it is written on unless it
embodies the will and natural tendencies of the governed. Where poaching
is popular, no law can stop it. Marriage is easy, and divorce difficult,
because this is Nature's plan. The natural law of attraction brings men
and women together, and it is difficult to separate them. Natural things
are easy, and artificial ones difficult. Most couples who desire freedom
only think they do: what they really want is a vacation; but they would
not separate for good if they could. It is hard to part--people who have
lived together grow to need each other. They want some one to quarrel
with.

Caesar Augustus, in his close study of character, introduced a limited
divorce. That is, in case of a family quarrel, he ordered the couple to
live apart for six months as a penalty. Quintilian says that usually
before the expired time the man and woman were surreptitiously living
together again, at which the court quietly winked, and finally this
form of penalty had to be abandoned because it made the courts
ridiculous.

Men and women do not get married because marriage is legal, nor do they
continue living together because divorce is difficult. They marry
because they desire to, and they do not separate because they do not
want to. The task that confronts the legislator is to find out what the
people want to do, and then legalize it.

In Rome, the custom of the parties divorcing themselves was prevalent,
and the courts were called upon to ratify the act, just to give the
matter respectability. Below a certain stratum in society, the formality
of legal marriage and divorce was waived entirely, just as it is
largely, now, among our colored population in the South. During the
French Revolution, the same custom largely obtained in France. And about
the year One Hundred Fifty in Rome there was danger that the people
would ov