Sufficient has, perhaps, been said to give the reader a general view of contemporary law-making on this most important matter of personal relations.  Most of the matters mentioned in this chapter are cohered by various learned societies in annual reports, or even by the government, in cases of marriage and divorce, and to such special treatises the reader may be referred for more precise information.  The Special Report of the United States Census Office, 1909, published early in 1910, makes a careful and elaborate study of the whole question from the years 1867 to 1906.  Such statistics are necessarily uncertain for reasons already indicated.  Court judgments do not indicate the true cause of divorce, nor is the complainant necessarily the innocent party, nor are the numbers of divorces granted, as for instance in Nevada, any fair indication of the normal divorce rate of the people really living in that State.  With this caution we will note that the number of divorces varied from about five hundred in each hundred thousand of married population every year in Washington, Montana, Colorado, Arkansas, Texas, Oregon, Wyoming, Indiana, Idaho, and Oklahoma, down to less than fifty, or about one-tenth as many, in New Jersey, New York, and Delaware.  Certain significant observations may certainly be made upon this table.  In the first place, the older States, the old thirteen, have, from the point of view of the conservative or divorce reformer, the best record.  At the head stand the three States just named, then North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts, Louisiana (largely French and Roman Catholic), and Connecticut—­ten of the original thirteen States.  Only New Hampshire and Rhode Island, the latter for obvious reasons, stand low down in the column; the last State having about three hundred divorces as against Montana’s five hundred.  South Carolina, having no divorces at all, does not appear.

The next observation one is compelled to make is that divorces are most numerous in the women’s suffrage States, or in the States neighboring, where “women’s rights” notions are most prevalent.  Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho stand second, third, sixth, and eighth, respectively, among the fifty States and Territories comprised in the table.[1] On succeeding pages are graphic maps showing the conditions which in this particular prevail for a number of years.  There is little change of these in the thirty years from 1870 to 1900.  The Atlantic seaboard and Southern States in 1870 are left white, with the exception of New England, which is slightly shaded; that is, they have less than twenty-five divorces per hundred thousand of inhabitants.  In 1880 the black belt States and Territories—­having one hundred and over—­extends from Wyoming over Montana, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada.  In 1900 it covers the entire far West and Southwest, with the exception of New Mexico (Roman Catholic) and Utah (Mormon).  The chart showing the relation of divorces to number of married population does not materially differ.  Now these figures, ranging from five hundred divorces per hundred thousand married population per year, or three hundred in the more lax States, down to less than fifty in the stricter States, compare with other countries as follows: