In 1859 an exaggerated importance was attached to the gross reasons for divorce, to the neglect of subtle but equally fatal impediments to the continuance of marriage.  This was pointed out by Gladstone, who was opposed to making adultery a cause of divorce at all.  “We have many causes,” he said, “more fatal to the great obligation of marriage, as disease, idiocy, crime involving punishment for life.”  Nowadays we are beginning to recognize not only such causes as these, but others of a far more intimate character which, as Milton long ago realized, cannot be embodied in statutes, or pleaded in law courts.  The matrimonial bond is not merely a physical union, and we have to learn that, as the author of The Question of English Divorce (p. 49) remarks, “other than physical divergencies are, in fact, by far the most important of the originating causes of matrimonial disaster.”

In England and Wales more husbands than wives petition for divorce, the wives who petition being about 40 per cent, of the whole.  Divorces are increasing, though the number is not large, in 1907 about 1,300, of whom less than half remarried.  The inadequacy of the divorce law is shown by the fact that during the same year about 7,000 orders for judicial separation were issued by magistrates.  These separation orders not only do not give the right to remarry, but they make it impossible to obtain divorce.  They are, in effect, an official permission to form relationships outside State marriage.

In the United States during the years 1887-1906 nearly 40 per cent, of the divorces granted were for “desertion,” which is variously interpreted in different States, and must often mean a separation by mutual consent.  Of the remainder, 19 per cent, were for unfaithfulness, and the same proportion for cruelty; but while the divorces granted to husbands for the infidelity of their wives are nearly three times as great proportionately as those granted to wives for their husband’s adultery, with regard to cruelty it is the reverse, wives obtaining 27 per cent, of their divorces on that ground and husbands only 10 per cent.

In Prussia divorce is increasing.  In 1907 there were eight thousand divorces, the cause in half the cases being adultery, and in about a thousand cases malicious desertion.  In cases of desertion the husbands were the guilty parties nearly twice as often as the wives, in cases of adultery only a fifth to an eighth part.

There cannot be the slightest doubt that the difficulty, the confusion, the inconsistency, and the flagrant indecency which surround divorce and the methods of securing it are due solely and entirely to the subtle persistence of traditions based, on the one hand, on the Canon law doctrines of the indissolubility of marriage and the sin of sexual intercourse outside marriage, and, on the other hand, on the primitive idea of marriage as a contract which economically subordinates the wife to the husband and renders her person, or at all events her guardianship, his property.  It is only when we realize how deeply these traditions have become embedded in the religious, legal, social and sentimental life of Europe that we can understand how it is that barbaric notions of marriage and divorce can to-day subsist in a stage of civilization which has, in many respects, advanced beyond such notions.