The result is that if a perfectly virtuous married couple comes forward to claim divorce, they are told that it is out of the question, for in such a case there must be a “defendant.”  They are to be punished for their virtue.  If each commits adultery and they again come forward to claim divorce, they are told that it is still out of the question, for there must be a “plaintiff.”  Before they were punished for their virtue; now they are to be punished in exactly the same way for their lack of it.  The couple must humor the law by adopting a course of action which may be utterly repugnant to both.  If only the wife alone will commit adultery, if only the husband will commit adultery and also inflict some act of cruelty upon his wife, if the innocent party will descend to the degradation of employing detectives and hunting up witnesses, the law is at their feet and hastens to accord to both parties the permission to remarry.  Provided, of course, that the parties have arranged this without “collusion.”  That is to say that our law, with its ecclesiastical traditions behind it, says to the wife:  Be a sinner, or to the husband:  Be a sinner and a criminal—­then we will do all you wish.  The law puts a premium on sin and on crime.  In order to pile absurdity on absurdity it claims that this is done in the cause of “public morality.”  To those who accept this point of view it seems that the sweeping away of divorce laws would undermine the bases of morality.  Yet there can be little doubt that the sooner such “morality” is undermined, and indeed utterly destroyed, the better it will be for true morality.

There is an influential movement in England for the reform of divorce, on the grounds that the present law is unjust, illogical, and immoral, represented by the Divorce Law Reform Union.  Even the former president of the Divorce Court, Lord Gorell, declared from the bench in 1906 that the English law produces deplorable results, and is “full of inconsistencies, anomalies and inequalities, amounting almost to absurdities.”  The points in the law which have aroused most protest, as being most behind the law of other nations, are the great expense of divorce, the inequality of the sexes, the failure to grant divorces for desertion and in cases of hopeless insanity, and the failure of separation orders to enable the separated parties to marry again.  Separation orders are granted by magistrates for cruelty, adultery, and desertion.  This “separation” is really the direct descendant of the Canon law divorce a mensa et thoro, and the inability to marry which it involves is merely a survival of the Canon law tradition.  At the present time magistrates—­exercising their discretion, it is admitted, in a careful and prudent manner—­issue some 7,000 separation orders annually, so that every year the population is increased by 14,000 individuals mostly in the age of sexual vigor, and some little more than children, who are forbidden