A Woman on Marriage.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume I, Issue 75, 3 December 1887, Page 2

A Woman on Marriage.

East divorce loosens all the rivets which hold society together and while giving no consolation to ianoeencei otters a premium to guilt The safeguard to marriage is its ness; the consciousness that no power on earth can ever place either party in the same position as before their union. Otherwise, only too many couples would separate in the first year of their union. But thq m|stakej known io be irrevocable, is borne, ana sometimes partially remedied, When irremediable, the utmost that both parties can expect, and most wou 1 desire, is to get free from another— as free as they can—and save their children from the consequences of their fatal erfon This, and ho more than this; I think they have a right to. Neither law ndf public opinion can place, or ousht to place, unhappy married couples in the same position as if they had never committed that fake step. One can deeply pity a woman whose husband is transported for or a mdn whose wife is shut up permanently in a lunatic asylum; but, though the& things involve and justify a life-lung ■ separation, they would form a ghastly and dangerous argument for divorce. Nay, speaking as a woman, and for women) I doubt if divorce should ever be permlssable; Few of us would either cate to become the Wife of a divorced man, or feel it right to marry at all while the husband) the father of our children wbte still alive; But the spectacle of a Womdn who refuses to condone vice und perpetuate evil, who has strength to cut off a right hand and put out a right eye, rather than sin against God and ruin the young souls He has entrusted to her, would be deterrent rather than dangerous. Many a man, who, know, mg his wife dare not or cannot leave him, is selfish, tyrannical, brutal, breaking every law of God and man except those fof wliieh he woiild be openly punished, if he thought she would leave him, could get nd of him by means short of divorce, and without the odium to herself and the freedom to hitti that result from divorce—would possibly amend bis ways. If not* he would richly deserve the justice without mercy—for mercy to the sinful is often mercilessness to the innocent—which is society’s only, safeguard against such men. They are not fit for domestic life; and, though in public life some of them brazen it out to the last, the best that society can do for them is to save other women from them, help their wives to gather together the fragments of a wrecked existence, and teach their children to cover over with wise and duteous silence the very name of father. There are fathers—and fathers. Those who deserve the name will not resent my distinguishing between them. And no good husband is harmed by laws which protect hapless women against bod husbands. On the other hand, there are women as unfit to be mothers as wives, and God help the man who has chosen such a one 1 But, as I have said, the choice is hia own ; he is—apparently, at least—the active, not the passive, agent, in his own hard fate. And he generally bears it in heroic silence. Bo should she. If, refusing to lower her womanhood by continuing to live with a bad man, she has courage to quit him, she deserves not merely pity, but respect. But she deserves* neither, if, while tamely submitting to her misery, she raises a feeble wailing or a monstrous howling against it. Buch women encourage bad men, and injure good men by appealing to the noblest quality of the stronger sex—compassion.— By the author of “ John Halifax, Gentleman, ’’ in Contemporary Beview,