re were eight
thousand divorces, the cause in half the cases being adultery,
and in about a thousand cases malicious desertion. In cases of
desertion the husbands were the guilty parties nearly twice as
often as the wives, in cases of adultery only a fifth to an
eighth part.

There cannot be the slightest doubt that the difficulty, the confusion,
the inconsistency, and the flagrant indecency which surround divorce and
the methods of securing it are due solely and entirely to the subtle
persistence of traditions based, on the one hand, on the Canon law
doctrines of the indissolubility of marriage and the sin of sexual
intercourse outside marriage, and, on the other hand, on the primitive
idea of marriage as a contract which economically subordinates the wife to
the husband and renders her person, or at all events her guardianship, his
property. It is only when we realize how deeply these traditions have
become embedded in the religious, legal, social and sentimental life of
Europe that we can understand how it is that barbaric notions of marriage
and divorce can to-day subsist in a stage of civilization which has, in
many respects, advanced beyond such notions.

The Canon law conception of the abstract religious sanctity of matrimony,
when transferred to the moral sphere, makes a breach of the marriage
relationship seem a public wrong; the conception of the contractive
subordination of the wife makes such a breach on her part, and even, by
transference of ideas, on his part, seem a private wrong. These two ideas
of wrong incoherently flourish side by side in the vulgar mind, even
to-day.

The economic subordination of the wife as a species of property
significantly comes into view when we find that a husband can claim, and
often secure, large sums of money from the man who sexually approaches his
property, by such trespass damaging it in its master's eyes.[339] To a
psychologist it would be obvious that a husband who has lacked the skill
so to gain and to hold his wife's love and respect that it is not
perfectly easy and natural to her to reject the advances of any other man
owes at least as much damages to her as she or her partner owes to him;
while if the failure is really on her side, if she is so incapable of
responding to love and trust and so easy a prey to an outsider, then
surely the husband, far from wishing for any money compensation, should
consider himself more than fully compensated b