by law to form legal marriages.  They contribute powerfully to the great forward movement which, as was shown in the previous chapter, marks the morality of our age.  But it is highly undesirable that free marriages should be formed, helplessly, by couples who have no choice in the matter, for it is unlikely that under such circumstances any high level of personal responsibility can be reached.  The matter could be easily remedied by dropping altogether a Canon law tradition which no longer has any vitality or meaning, and giving to the magistrate’s separation order the force of a decree of divorce.

New Zealand and the Australian colonies, led by Victoria in 1889, have passed divorce laws which, while more or less framed on the English model, represent a distinct advance.  Thus in New Zealand the grounds for divorce are adultery on either side, wilful desertion, habitual drunkenness, and conviction to imprisonment for a term of years.

It is natural that an Englishman should feel acutely sensitive to this blot in the law of England and desire the speedy disappearance of a system so open to scathing sarcasm.  It is natural that every humane person should grow impatient of the spectacle of so many blighted lives, of so much misery inflicted on innocent persons—­and on persons who even when technically guilty are often the victims of unnatural circumstances—­by the persistence of a mediaeval system of ecclesiastical tyranny and inquisitorial insolence into an age when sexual relationships are becoming regarded as the sacred secret of the persons intimately concerned, and when more and more we rely on the responsibility of the individual in making and maintaining such relationships.

When, however, we refrain from concentrating our attention on particular countries and embrace the general movement of civilization in the matter of divorce during recent times, there cannot be the slightest doubt as to the direction of that movement.  England was a pioneer in the movement half a century ago, and to-day every civilized country is moving in the same direction.  France broke with the old ecclesiastical tradition of the indissolubility of matrimony in 1885 by a divorce law in some respects very reasonable.  The wife may obtain a divorce on an equality with the husband (though she is liable to imprisonment for adultery), the co-respondent occupies a very subordinate position in adultery charges, and facility is offered for divorce on the ground of simple injures graves (excluding as far as possible mere incompatibility of temper), while the judge has the power, which he often successfully exerts, to effect a reconciliation in private or to grant a decree without public trial.  The influence of France has doubtless been influential in moulding the divorce laws of the other Latin countries.