[348] In an important article, with illustrative cases, on “The Neuro-psychical Element in Conjugal Aversion” (Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, Sept., 1892) Smith Baker refers to the cases in which “a man may find himself progressively becoming antipathetic, through recognition of the comparatively less developed personality of the one to whom he happens to be married.  Marrying, perhaps, before he has learned to accurately judge of character and its tendencies, he awakens to the fact that he is honorably bound to live all his physiological life with, not a real companion, but a mere counterfeit.”  The cases are still more numerous, the same writer observes, in which the sexual appetite of the wife fails to reveal itself except as the result of education and practice.  “This sort of natural-unnatural condition is the source of much disappointment, and of intense suffering on the part of the woman as well as of family dissatisfaction.”  Yet such causes for divorce are far too complex to be stated in statute-books, and far too intimate to be pleaded in courts of justice.

[349] Ten years ago, if not still, the United States came fourth in order of frequency of divorce, after Japan, Denmark, and Switzerland.

[350] Lecky, the historian of European morals, has pointed out (Democracy and Liberty, vol. ii, p. 172) the close connection generally between facility of divorce and a high standard of sexual morality.

[351] So, e.g., Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, vol. i, p. 237.

[352] In England this step was taken in the reign of Henry VII, when the forcible marriage of women against their will was forbidden by statute (3 Henry VII, c. 2).  Even in the middle of the seventeenth century, however, the question of forcible marriage had again to be dealt with (Inderwick, Interregnum, pp. 40 et seq.).

[353] Woods Hutchinson (Contemporary Review, Sept., 1905) argues that when there is epilepsy, insanity, moral perversion, habitual drunkenness, or criminal conduct of any kind, divorce, for the sake of the next generation, should be not permissive but compulsory.  Mere divorce, however, would not suffice to attain the ends desired.

[354] Similarly in Germany, Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, who had suffered much from marriage, whatever her own defects of character may have been, writes at the end of Meine Lebensbeichte that “as long as women have not the courage to regulate, without State-interference or Church-interference, relationships which concern themselves alone, they will not be free.”  In place of this old decayed system of marriage so opposed to our modern thoughts and feelings, she would have private contracts made by a lawyer.  In England, at a much earlier period, Charles Kingsley, who was an ardent friend to women’s movements, and whose feeling for womanhood amounted almost to worship, wrote to J.S.  Mill:  “There will never be a good world for women until the last remnant of the Canon law is civilized off the earth.”