matters, then our divorce law does in this direction already go too far.  A husband or wife may do far more injury to the home by constantly neglecting it for the companionship of some outside person with whom no “matrimonial offence” is ever committed.  Of course, if our divorce law exists mainly for the gratification of the fiercer sexual resentments, well and good, but if that is so, let us abandon our pretence that marriage is an institution for the establishment and protection of homes.  And while on the one hand existing divorce laws appear to be obsessed by sexual offences, other things of far more evil effect upon the home go without a remedy.  There are, for example, desertion, domestic neglect, cruelty to the children drunkenness or harmful drug-taking, indecency of living and uncontrollable extravagance.  I cannot conceive how any logical mind, having once admitted the principle of divorce, can hesitate at making these entirely home-wrecking things the basis of effective pleas.  But in another direction, some strain of sentimentality in my nature makes me hesitate to go with the great majority of divorce law reformers.  I cannot bring myself to agree that either a long term of imprisonment or the misfortune of insanity should in itself justify a divorce.  I admit the social convenience, but I wince at the thought of those tragic returns of the dispossessed.  So far as insanity goes, I perceive that the cruelty of the law would but endorse the cruelty of nature.  But I do not like men to endorse the cruelty of nature.

And, of course, there is no decent-minded person nowadays but wants to put an end to that ugly blot upon our civilisation, the publication of whatever is most spicy and painful in divorce court proceedings.  It is an outrage which falls even more heavily on the innocent than on the guilty, and which has deterred hundreds of shy and delicate-minded people from seeking legal remedies for nearly intolerable wrongs.  The sort of person who goes willingly to the divorce court to-day is the sort of person who would love a screaming quarrel in a crowded street.  The emotional breach of the marriage bond is as private an affair as its consummation, and it would be nearly as righteous to subject young couples about to marry to a blustering cross-examination by some underbred bully of a barrister upon their motives, and then to publish whatever chance phrases in their answers appeared to be amusing in the press, as it is to publish contemporary divorce proceedings.  The thing is a nastiness, a stream of social contagion and an extreme cruelty, and there can be no doubt that whatever other result this British Royal Commission may have, there at least will be many sweeping alterations.

THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE EMPIRE

Sec. 1