Wholesale Divorce.

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

Wholesale Divorce.

Septimbeb 24 was the red letter day in the history of the divorce courts of Chicago. More than one hundred default cases alone—said to be the largest number on record in one day—were disposed of. The reputation of Chicago as a divorce head quarters, the material growth of the city’s population, and the fact that the judges have refused during their vacations this year to hear any but urgent matters, are variously assigned as the causes for the exceptional heaviness of the calendar.

Five courts, exclusively occupied with divorces, were working simultaneously. The two hundred and odd persons whose matrimonial existence it r. as proposed to judicially murder were lost in the crowds of sympathising friends and curious spectators who came to witness the execution. Away tip in the tall Court-house, on the floor nearest heaven, were the five divorce mills. Four spacious elevators were constantly kept crowded bringing from the bottom floors the fodder for the mills. Coming and going up and down, for hours, the elevators carried their cargoes—people of the most diverse degree and kind, some all tears and sighs, other* flippant or grimly content, and still others smiling and happy• Then there were the children, generally brought along to fill some gap in the testimony. While the long procession was passing and repaestng, the hardened officials looked on, grinning at the array of domestic misery spread out before them. Owing to the press of business, marriage knot* were loosed between ill-matehed couples with even more than the usual celerity of Chicago divorce court*. Before everyone of the five judges all the seats and the aisle* between were densely packed with a motley crowd, and not a syllable uttered, by a shamed, brokenhearted wife escaped them. Men dropped in only to find themselves ■landing within arm's reach of their ex-wives. Sometimes a pair of green •yea would glare at one of those intruder*. Bi* inner consciousness would tell him, and he would turn around a seared, white face.

“ Papa 1 Papa!" cried a little girl, as a well-dressed gentleman came up to one of the elevators, a little while after the court convened. The child was snatched away by the lady who held her hand, and the gentleman turned his head and instead of waiting for the elevator walked down the ■tain and out into the street. He had just been divorced from the lady who bad the child. It was well along in the afternoon before the courts were closed.