DIVORCE IN ENGLAND.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 322, 8 October 1908, Page 3

DIVORCE IN ENGLAND.

This is tho "silly season," writes the London correspondent of an Australian paper. Yet there is more wit and wisdom in the time of year than the title promises. Parliament has risen; tho law courts are closed. Papa, mamma, and the baby aro free to address themselves to the questions which really matter. This year, by common consent, the problems of womanhood are uppermost. The penny and halfpenny newspapers have thrown open their columns to long discussions upon various aspects of marriage and divorce, and their readers have been retailing their opinions and experiences with astonishing vigour!. The activitiy of the suffragettes is, no doubt, largely responsible for the peculiar turn which public discussion has taken! ■ Everyone knows that a very, real motive behind the feminist movement has been the demand for justice and fair play in sex matters. But an even more direct cause is the interest aroused by the Archbishop of Canterbury's encyclical, embodying the views of the Church Congress and the conference of the Anglican bishops at Lambeth Palaco. Following upon the archbishop's outspoken opinions, many women have been criticising marriagfe as it exists in England to-day in a fashion which would have shocked an earlier generation. Tho old regard for marriago as one of the supremo sacraments of the. church is evidently sadly out of fashion. Among other things, a vivid light has been thrown upon the consequence of the Summary Jurisdiction Act of 1895. The popular title of this is the "woman's charter," a name which fairly .suggests the scopo of the measure. The Act grants separation orders to wives who can show that their husbands have deserted them, or, by cruelty, caused them to leave their homes. These "separation orders" now number about eight thousand a year. At least seventy thousand have been granted during tho last ten years. It seems that the husband and the wife rarely como together again, so that a separation is practically a divorce, without .freedom to remarry. Properly, tho terrible figures quoted should bo added to the number, of divorces, if the present revolt, against the old ecclesiastical view of marriage is to be estimated. The interesting and important fact is that these "separation orders" can be granted by any justico. of tho peace. They have come to bo the divorce decrees of the poor woman Tho more militant reformers aro demanding that the "separations" should automatically becomo divorces, if, after five years, the husband and wife have not been reconciled.