COURT OF MOCK MORALS

Evening Star, Issue 19268, 5 June 1926, Page 19

COURT OF MOCK MORALS

EHRUSH DIVORCE LAW SCANDAL How we all love the old cliche that there is no justice like English justice—no fairer trial than an English trial in the world. Yet (writes Oigle Hail-Brown, in the ‘ Sunday Chronicle’) every day in our divorce courts is now being meted out the justice not tempered with mercy which is a relxo ot barbarism, and only suitable for a race of barbarians still untouched by the enlightenment of civilisation. To the happily married our divorce laws are a laughable absurdity. To the wrongly mated they are the yoke of the oppressor—the antithesis of liberty—a foul smirch on the justice of the country of the free. The divorce law's of this country attempt to handle the matrimonial problems of a nation from a_ purely sexual rind physical point of view. Unfaithfulness, habitual drunkenness, and physical violence are demanded by the law, which gasify lags 1,000 years behind the times. A VILE SOLUTION. This is the horror which must be put into operation for the most sensitive and intellectual sufferers from the yoke of mismarriage, and this is the law which makes the very name of divorce courts stink in the nostrils of decent, right-living people. There is no justification whatever for a law which says in effect; “ You may dissolve unsatisfactory marriage, but first of all jo u shall be degraded, your intimate miseries made and your private life laid bare.’ Then Justice sits back with bandaged eyes and approves the lying evidence of broken-hearted men and women who dip in the mud of divorce court sex for the first time to satisfy the ghoulish requirements of the divorce laws. That this is a state of affairs which exists flagrantly and is judicially recognised is proved bv the fact that solicitors of good standing actually suggest the. provision of the “ usual hotel bill ” as a way out of a matrimonial impasse wdth no other solution. Sick at heart and desperate for relief, who knows how many accept this vile solution? And who knows how many more resume the yoke and give up hope of relief rather than outrage their fastidiousness and besmirch their good names ? DEARLY BOUGHT. Divorce should not be dearly bought at the price of privacy and reputation. I have seen the argument advanced that the unpleasant evidence required, coupled with the publicity, acts as a ’eterrent. An abominable argument, for it only acts as a deterrent to the sensitive and the fastidious, and why they should be deterred at all from winning back to happiness is difficult for a non-legal individual to understand. People may marry by mutual consent, privately, and without hindrance. Therefore if divorce exists at aH it should bo equally easy to accomplish. If it is beneficial to the State for suf- 1 faring human beings to fight through | the Tricked publicity of tho divorce courts for freedom, why does the State not demand that everyone socking to marry shall prove to a matrimonial court that they have sane and good reasons for it? There arc as many scandalous and abominable motives for marriage ns there are for divorce, and there are as many clean and wholesome grounds for dissolving marriage as there are lor contracting it. SAVAGE SENTENCE. Tho awful barbarism of the law as it exists is that it recognises no sane, sound, and clean reason for two illmated human beings to part. Let one be unfaithful to the other and tho neglected one may claim a bitter freedom. Let both find solace in more i congenial arms, and tho sentence is a savage one—for life. Even the reprieved murderer can look forward to personal liberty again. His punishment is not so heavy as that for one poor human mistake.

Not only is tho divorce law out of date, but tho conjugal abuses it revolves round have gone out ot fashion. Men and women no longer do the things they stand in tho witness-box and say they do to set in motion tho creaking apparatus of the law. Everyone hut the King’s Proctor sees through the farcical evidence of the wife who seeks to prove that a man of breeding and education has used physical violence on her person, when tho tiuth is that his appalling meanness is driving her insane. What a scandal that a decent, cleanliving, honest British gentleman should present the “ usual hotel bill ” to buy freedom from a woman with a heart of stone and a tongue dipped in vitriol 1 There is no better reason for a divorce than a mutual desire to be free. Tho argument about the welfare of children docs not bold water, for if there is one thing worse for a child than all other things it is a divided, unhappy, unstable home. If there must be grounds for divorce to bo discussed in public, let them be sound, reasonable grounds, which can be presented without lying and without shame.

Let tho high-spirited wife be free of the mean bully who degrades her womanhood.

Let the peace-loving husband rid himself of tho shrewish scold who makes his days a misery and his nights a nightmare. What pain can a gay Lothario inflict in comparison with the ceaseless torment or tho sullen husband, ridden by tho dark devils of jealousy and suspicion ? What havoc can tho flirtatious wife create comparable with the pit of misery dug by the woman who spends and spends—-who knows not the value of every shilling wrung from tho hard fist of tlio labor market—who turns tho product of brain and nerve and sweat into tho mockery of ribbons and laces—who weaves the blackness of debt and despair round the husband the law says she cannot rob? Let honest men and women free themselves quietly and decently of the bully, tho shrew,' tho lunatic, and the parasite. Let well-meaning men and women who have made a natgiH human mistake undo it and begin again. Let the divorce court cease to ho a court of mock morals and become a court of honest law. Its horrid machinery is unclean, and ought to ho scrapped. It is a foul blot on tho fair face of British Justice. It encourages lying in the witness-box and seeks to hide the fact hy the appointment of a farcical gentleman known as the King’s Proctor, an official whose only logical place is in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.