In England itself the reforms in marriage law effected by the Puritans were at the Restoration largely submerged.  For two and a half centuries longer the English spiritual courts administered what was substantially the old Canon law.  Divorce had, indeed, become more difficult than before the Reformation, and the married woman’s lot was in consequence harder.  From the sixteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth, English marriage law was peculiarly harsh and rigid, much less liberal than that of any other Protestant country.  Divorce was unknown to the ordinary English law, and a special act of Parliament, at enormous expense, was necessary to procure it in individual cases.[337] There was even an attitude of self-righteousness in the maintenance of this system.  It was regarded as moral.  There was complete failure to realize that nothing is more immoral than the existence of unreal sexual unions, not only from the point of view of theoretical but also of practical morality, for no community could tolerate a majority of such unions.[338] In 1857 an act for reforming the system was at last passed with great difficulty.  It was a somewhat incoherent and make-shift measure, and was avowedly put forward only as a step towards further reform; but it still substantially governs English procedure, and in the eyes of many has set a permanent standard of morality.  The spirit of blind conservatism,—­Nolumus leges Angliae mutare,—­which in this sphere had reasserted itself after the vital movement of Reform and Puritanism, still persists.  In questions of marriage and divorce English legislation and English public feeling are behind alike both the Latin land of France and the Puritanically moulded land of the United States.

The author of an able and temperate essay on The Question of English Divorce, summing up the characteristics of the English divorce law, concludes that it is:  (1) unequal, (2) immoral, (3) contradictory, (4) illogical, (5) uncertain, and (6) unsuited to present requirements.  It was only grudgingly introduced in a bill, presented to Parliament in 1857, which was stubbornly resisted during a whole session, not only on religious grounds by the opponents of divorce, but also by the friends of divorce, who desired a more liberal measure.  It dealt with the sexes unequally, granting the husband but not the wife divorce for adultery alone.  In introducing the bill the Attorney-General apologized for this defect, stating that the measure was not intended to be final, but merely as a step towards further legislation.  That was more than half a century ago, but the further step has not yet been taken.  Incomplete and unsatisfactory as the measure was, it seems to have been regarded by many as revolutionary and dangerous in the highest degree.  The author of an article on “Modern Divorce” in the Universal Review for July, 1859, while approving in principle of the establishment of a special Divorce Court, yet declared