largely held in America," and when applied to family life it
often leads to an impatience with these duties which the
individual is either born into or has voluntarily accepted. "I am
constrained to think that the prevalence of divorce is to be
ascribed in no small degree to the influence of democratic
ideas--that is, of false democratic ideas--and our hope lies in
advancing towards a higher and truer democracy." A more recent
American writer, this time a woman, Anna A. Rogers ("Why American
Marriages Fail," _Atlantic Monthly_, Sept., 1907) speaks in the
same sense, though perhaps in too unqualified a manner. She
states that the frequency of divorce in America is due to three
causes: (1) woman's failure to realize that marriage is her work
in the world; (2) her growing individualism; (3) her lost art of
giving, replaced by a highly developed receptive faculty. The
American woman, this writer states, in discovering her own
individuality has not yet learnt how to manage it; it is still
"largely a useless, uneasy factor, vouchsafing her very little
more peace than it does those in her immediate surcharged
vicinity." Her circumstances tend to make of her "a curious
anomalous hybrid; a cross between a magnificent, rather
unmannerly boy, and a spoiled, exacting _demi-mondaine_, who
sincerely loves in this world herself alone." She has not yet
learnt that woman's supreme work in the world can only be
attained through the voluntary acceptance of the restraints of
marriage. The same writer points out that the fault is not alone
with American women, but also with American men. Their idolatry
of their women is largely responsible for that intolerance and
selfishness which causes so many divorces; "American women are,
as a whole, pampered and worshipped out of all reason." But the
men, who lend themselves to this, do not feel that they can treat
their wives with the same comradeship as the French treat their
wives, nor seek their advice with the same reliance; the American
woman is placed on an unreal pedestal. Yet another American
writer, Rafford Pyke ("Husbands and Wives," _Cosmopolitan_,
1902), points out that only a small proportion of American
marriages are really unhappy, these being chiefly among the more
cultured classes, in which the movement of expansion in women's
interes