(2) Yet there are cases where love is hopelessly killed and harmony is impossible; cases where much suffering, and even moral degeneration, would result from continuance of the married life.  Where a man transfers his love to another or indulges in infidelity to his vows; where he crazes himself with liquor or some other narcotic, and will not give it up; where he treats his wife with cruelty or contempt, or through selfishness or laziness deserts or refuses to support her; where she refuses to perform her wifely duties, gives herself to other men, makes home intolerable for him—­in short, in any case where mutual loyalty and cooperation are hopeless of attainment, it is surely best that there should be separation.  It does not make for the welfare of the children, or for the sanctity of marriage, that such wretched travesties of it should continue.  Moreover, for eugenic reasons, we must urge the freeing of wives from husbands who have transmissible diseases, inheritable defects, or chronic alcoholism.  Nor should the fact of one mistake preclude the injured party from another opportunity for happiness and usefulness.  Whether the guilty man or woman, the one wholly or chiefly to blame for the failure, should be permitted to remarry is another matter; but probably, on the whole, it is better than the alternative encouragement of immorality and illegitimacy.

(3) The community should exert its influence toward the remedying of the present anomalies and uncertainties by making both marriage laws and divorce laws more stringent, and uniform throughout the country.  Statutes that will render impulsive marriage impossible, by requiring an interval to elapse after statement of intention to marry, and making a clean bill of health necessary; divorce laws that shall refuse to pander to caprice and willfulness, but shall make it easy, without scandal or needless publicity, to deliver a woman or a man from an intolerable and irremediable situation, and that shall not be appreciably more lenient in one State than in another, will go far toward curing contemporary evils.  It may yet be that the Constitution will be so amended as to permit the National Government to control these matters and thus replace our present chaos with order.

Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap.  XXVI.  Scharlieb and Silby, Youth and Sex.  C. Read, Natural and Social Morals, chap.  VII.  Anon, Life, Love, and Light (Macmillan), pp. 84-96.  R. C. Cabot, What Men Live By, chaps.  XXIV-xxix.  W. L. Sheldon, An Ethical Movement, chaps.  XI, XII.  C. F. Dole, Ethics of Progress, part vii, chap.  III.  Felix Adler, Marriage and Divorce, The Spiritual Meaning of Marriage.  N. Smyth, Christian Ethics, pp. 405-15.  B. P. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, part iii, chaps.  VIII, ix.  W. E. H. Lecky, The Map of Life, chap.  XIV.  Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque.  G. E. C. Gray, Husband and Wife.  J. Rus, The Peril and Preservation of the Home.  Thompson and Geddes, Problems of