brought up with ideas of stern self-control at all. This being the
case, it would seem that the only rational standpoint to view the
question of divorce reform or divorce restriction from is the one
which gives the vastest outlook over each side's eventuality,
realising present conditions and tendencies to be as they are, and not
as they were, or ought to be. The forces which produced these
conditions are not on the decline, but, if anything, on the increase,
and must therefore be reckoned with and not ignored. What are they
likely to bring in the future? Still greater intolerance of all
restraint, still more desire for change? And if this is so, will it
have been wiser to have made the law harder or more lenient? That is
the question we shall soon, as a people, have to try to decide.

In setting out to look calmly at the subject of divorce, no good can
be arrived at by studying isolated cases, inasmuch as surely there can
be no divided opinion upon the fact of the cruelty of some of them,
and the certainty of their betterment by divorce. The one and only aim
to keep in view is what will be best for the whole people, and no
other aspect should ever influence the true citizen in making up his
mind upon so vital a question. Thus surely we ought each one of us to
ask himself or herself to look ahead, and try to imagine what would be
the result to our nation of relaxing the severity of the present
divorce law--or of increasing it. Of the effects of its present
administration we can judge, so it ought to be no impossible task to
work from that backwards or forwards.

But to look at any subject dispassionately, without the prejudice of
religion or personal feeling, is one of the hardest things to
accomplish. These two forces always make people take views as
unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, regardless of
totally altered conditions and requirements of mankind. I hold a brief
for neither side, and in this paper I only want to suggest some points
of view so as to help, perhaps, some others to look at the matter with
justice, as I have tried to look at it myself. It would seem to me
that divorce as a means of ridding oneself of one partner merely to be
happier with another must surely always be wrong, because it must
entail the degradation of conscious personal motive, in the knowledge
that one had taken advantage of a law to gain an end, and to help one
to break a vow solely for one's own gratification. The en