that the new court was “tending to destroy marriage as a social institution and to sap female chastity,” and that “everyone now is a husband and wife at will.”  “No one,” he adds, “can now justly quibble at a deficiency of matrimonial vomitories.”

Yet, according to this law, it is not even possible for a wife to obtain a divorce for her husband’s adultery, unless he is also cruel or deserts her.  At first “cruelty” meant physical cruelty and of a serious kind.  But in course of time the meaning of the word was extended to pain inflicted on the mind, and now coldness and neglect may almost of themselves constitute cruelty, though the English court has sometimes had the greatest hesitation in accepting the most atrocious forms of refined cruelty, because it involved no “physical” element.  “The time may very reasonably be looked forward to, however,” a legal writer has stated (Montmorency, “The Changing Status of a Married Woman,” Law Quarterly Review, April, 1897), “when almost any act of misconduct will, in itself, be considered to convey such mental agony to the innocent party as to constitute the cruelty requisite under the Act of 1857.” (The question of cruelty is fully discussed in J.R.  Bishop’s Commentaries on Marriage, Divorce and Separation, 1891, vol. i, Ch.  XLIX; cf.  Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 111).

There can be little doubt, however, that cruelty alone is a reasonable cause for divorce.  In many American States, where the facilities for divorce are much greater than in England, cruelty is recognized as itself sufficient cause, whether the wife or the husband is the complainant.  The acts of cruelty alleged have sometimes been seemingly very trivial.  Thus divorces have been pronounced in America on the ground of the “cruel and inhuman conduct” of a wife who failed to sew her husband’s buttons on, or because a wife “struck plaintiff a violent blow with her bustle,” or because a husband does not cut his toe-nails, or because “during our whole married life my husband has never offered to take me out riding.  This has been a source of great mental suffering and injury.”  In many other cases, it must be added, the cruelty inflicted by the husband, even by the wife—­for though usually, it is not always, the husband who is the brute—­is of an atrocious and heart-rending character (Report on Marriage and Divorce in the United States, issued by Hon. Carroll D. Wright, Commissioner of Labor, 1889).  But even in many of the apparently trivial cases—­as of a husband who will not wash, and a wife who is constantly evincing a hasty temper—­it must be admitted that circumstances which, in the more ordinary relationships of life may be tolerated, become intolerable in the intimate relationship of sexual union.  As a matter of fact, it has been found by careful investigation that the American courts weigh well the cases that come before them, and are not careless in the granting of decrees of divorce.