doctrine in principle everywhere."

It is quite evident that from the social or the moral point of view, it is
best that when a husband and wife can no longer live together, they should
part amicably, and in harmonious agreement effect all the arrangements
rendered necessary by their separation. The law ridiculously forbids them
to do so, and declares that they must not part at all unless they are
willing to part as enemies. In order to reach a still lower depth of
absurdity and immorality the law goes on to say that if as a matter of
fact they have succeeded in becoming enemies to each other to such an
extent that each has wrongs to plead against the other party they cannot
be divorced at all![342] That is to say that when a married couple have
reached a degree of separation which makes it imperatively necessary, not
merely in their own interests but in the moral interests of society, that
they should be separated and their relations to other parties concerned
regularized, then they must on no account be separated.

It is clear how these provisions of the law are totally opposed to the
demands of reason and morality. Yet at the same time it is equally clear
how no efforts of the lawyers, however skilful or humane those efforts may
be, can bring the present law into harmony with the demands of modern
civilization. It is not the lawyers who are at fault; they have done
their best, and, in England, it is entirely owing to the skilful and
cautious way in which the judges have so far as possible pressed the law
into harmony with modern needs, that our antiquated divorce laws have
survived at all. It is the system which is wrong. That system is the
illegitimate outgrowth of the Canon law which grew up around conceptions
long since dead. It involves the placing of the person who imperils the
theoretical indissolubility of the matrimonial bond in the position of a
criminal, now that he can no longer be publicly condemned as a sinner. To
aid and abet that criminal is itself an offence, and the aider and abettor
of the criminal must, therefore, be inconsequently punished by the curious
method of refraining from punishing the criminal. We do not openly assert
that the defendant in a divorce case is a criminal; that would be to
render the absurdity of it too obvious, and, moreover, would be hardly
consistent with the permission to claim damages which is based on a
different idea. We hover uncertainly between two conceptions o