Divorce is not one of those things that stand alone, and neither divorce law nor the general principles of divorce are to be discussed without a reference to antecedent arrangements.  Divorce is a sequel to marriage, and a change in the divorce law is essentially a change in the marriage law.  There was a time in this country when our marriage was a practically divorceless bond, soluble only under extraordinary circumstances by people in situations of exceptional advantage for doing so.  Now it is a bond under conditions, and in the event of the adultery of the wife, or of the adultery plus cruelty or plus desertion of the husband, and of one or two other rarer and more dreadful offences, it can be broken at the instance of the aggrieved party.  A change in the divorce law is a change in the dissolution clauses, so to speak, of the contract for the marriage partnership.  It is a change in the marriage law.

A great number of people object to divorce under any circumstances whatever.  This is the case with the orthodox Catholic and with the orthodox Positivist.  And many religious and orthodox people carry their assertion of the indissolubility of marriage to the grave; they demand that the widow or widower shall remain unmarried, faithful to the vows made at the altar until death comes to the release of the lonely survivor also.  Re-marriage is regarded by such people as a posthumous bigamy.  There is certainly a very strong and logical case to be made out for a marriage bond that is indissoluble even by death.  It banishes step-parents from the world.  It confers a dignity of tragic inevitability upon the association of husband and wife, and makes a love approach the gravest, most momentous thing in life.  It banishes for ever any dream of escape from the presence and service of either party, or of any separation from the children of the union.  It affords no alternative to “making the best of it” for either husband or wife; they have taken a step as irrevocable as suicide.  And some logical minds would even go further, and have no law as between the members of a family, no rights, no private property within that limit.  The family would be the social unit and the father its public representative, and though the law might intervene if he murdered or ill-used wife or children, or they him, it would do so in just the same spirit that it might prevent him from self-mutilation or attempted suicide, for the good of the State simply, and not to defend any supposed independence of the injured member.  There is much, I assert, to be said for such a complete shutting up of the family from the interference of the law, and not the least among these reasons is the entire harmony of such a view with the passionate instincts of the natural man and woman in these matters.  All unsophisticated human beings appear disposed to a fierce proprietorship in their children and their sexual partners, and in no respect is the ordinary mortal so easily induced to vehemence and violence.