While divorce is increasing steadily all over the world, and most rapidly in the most intelligent and progressive sections, the subject is so bound up with our most deep-seated prejudices that it is difficult to secure any intelligent thinking on the subject.  Thus, most people think Sioux Falls, in South Dakota, and Reno, Nevada, are places of free divorce, but the fact is that twenty-one other States have a higher divorce rate than South Dakota; and fourteen have a higher rate than Nevada.  So, too, the impression that divorces spring from hasty action is certainly wrong, for in 46.5 per cent. of those for which we have records there had been a separation of more than three years before the divorce was granted.  The idea that people generally seek divorces that they may marry some one else seems also unfounded, since in the cases for which we have records, less than forty per cent. remarry within a year.

There are three main objections which one hears urged against free divorce.  The first is that organized society rests on the family, and with free divorce anarchy would ensue.  In reply, it is pointed out that the same argument was used to support kings, aristocracies and a universal church.  All these have been set aside, in many parts of the earth, and society seems even more stable than before.  The love of men and women is probably more powerful and less in need of adventitious support than either patriotism or religion.

In the second place, it is claimed that children will suffer when parents separate.  It is replied that this is true, but they were already suffering when parents had ceased to love each other.  The fact that children are involved in only two out of five divorces seems to indicate that children hold parents together when the opposition is not too strong; and when a separation occurs, those who favor divorce claim that a child is better off with either father or mother alone than with both if love is absent.

In the third place, it is pointed out that often only one desires the divorce and that this brings tragedy to the other life.  In reply it is claimed that many of the tragedies of life have always gathered around the love of men and women, that when marriage is declined tragedy often follows, and that compelling a person to live with some one whom he does not love, and may even dislike, is more tragic than any separation.

In conclusion, advocates of free divorce claim that their proposals are profoundly conservative, that they are seeking to bring marriage back to its eternally binding realities.  They say that under our present conditions of restricted divorce, we have wide-spread prostitution, constant irregularities that are tolerated and condoned, and a million divorced people, some prevented from remarrying and all socially ostracized, so that the whole group is a dangerous element in our midst.  These advocates claim that with free divorce, granted some months after the determination to separate