LOOSE NOTIONS ABOUT MARRIAGE.

New Zealand Times, Volume LI, Issue 8846, 25 November 1889, Page 7

LOOSE NOTIONS ABOUT MARRIAGE.

The frivolous character of the complaints in many cases of divorce recently granted and now on the docket leads thoughtful people to ask, ‘What are we coming to?’ We do not know that the wives in a given number of cases are more blamable than the husbands, but it is the wives who suffer the most from such sundered relations. As a rule, they suffer more in their affections and in their reputations than the stronger sex. While there is somethingtobe said in favour of a law of divorce which separates mismated couples, there is no condemnation too severe for men and women who enter the marriage state with the idea in their minds that if they do not like it they will take advantage of the law that allows them to escape. Yet there is no doubt but that thoughtless young men and giddy girls often do approach the altar with that thought in their minds. In cases where the husband is very young the idea is apt to grow in strength as the years pass. He finds himself while yet on the sunny side of thirty with a wife who has posdbly lost some of her_ girlish,beauty ; and children whose necessities absorb the greater part of his earnings. He compares the free and independent life of some of his bachelor associates, and imagination magnifies the pleasures he might participate in if he was unmarried. Some day the wife, who is illprepared to fight the battle of life alone, is stunned by the service of an application for a divorce. Cases of this kind, we regret to say, are not uncommon. Almost everyone can recall one or more in his circle of acquaintances, Of course, if the real reasons were preferred in the application - less harm would be done ; but the legal necesrity of setting forth reasons often suggests a resort to falsehood. Trifles in the way of disagreement will be magnified and baseless suspicions urged as matters of fact. The remedy for them, as for most other evils, lies with the people themselves. The law is not so much at fault as the facility with which it is evaded. The Church and society are too lenient in matters of this kind. It may be questioned if a man who divorces a wife for no other reason than that he prefers to live single is injured in his business or social relations by his act. If he has been a church-member he still remains one. And yet he has committed the most cowaudly crime a man can commit. A woman thus divorced, unless she have powerful friends, has no future, and children are thrown upon the world without the character and instincts of right which are inculcated in well-regulated homes. —San Francisco Call.