BRITISH DIVORCE LAWS SCANDAL

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12507, 24 July 1926, Page 11

BRITISH DIVORCE LAWS SCANDAL

The Barbarous Court of Mock Morals

The recent discussion in the House of Commons on the Judicial Proceedings Bill which seeks to regulate the publishing of reports of divorce cases to prevent injury to public morals, has again focused attention upon our divorce laws. There will be varying views on Mrs Olga Hall-Brown's call for the wholesale revision of these laws (as set out below), which she says are to the happily married a laughable absurdity, and to the wrongly mated the yoke of the oppressor.

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. Vet every day in our divorce courts is now being nietod out the justice not tempeieu with mercy which is a relic of barbarism, and only suitable for a race of barbarians still untouched bv 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 pf liberty —a foul smirch on the justice of the country of the free. The divorce laws of this country attempt to handle the matrimonial problems of a nation front a sexual and physical point of view. Unfaithfulness, habitual drunkenness, and physical violence are demanded by the law. which easily lags a thousand 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 tho yoke of mis-marriage, and this is the law which makes the very name of the divorce courts stink in tho nostrils of decent, right-living people. There i:i no justification whatever for a law which says in effect, ‘‘you-, may dissolve unsatisfactory marriage, but first of all you shall be degraded, your intimate miseries made public, and your private life laid bare.” Then justice sits back with bandaged eyes nnd approves the lying evidence of broken-hearted men and women who clip 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 by the fact that solicitors of good standing actually suggest ths provision of the ‘ usual hotel hill” as a way out of a matrimonial impasse with no other solution. Sick at heart, and desperate tor relief, who knows how many accept this vile solution? And who knows liow many more resume the yoke and give up

hope of relief rather 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 tli-> argument advanced that the unpleasant evidence required, coupled with the publicity, acts as a deterrent. An abnominablc 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 uon-legal individual to understand. People may marry by mutual consent, privately, and without hindrance. Therefor© if divorce exists at all it should be equally easy to accomplish. If it is beneficial to the State for suffering human beings to fight through the wicked publicity of tho divorce courts for freedom, why does tho State not demand that, everyone seeking to marry shall prove to a matrimonial court that they have sane and good reasons for it? There are as many scandalous and abominable motive for marriage as there are for divorce, and there arc as many clean and wholesome grounds for dissolving marriage as there aro for contracting it. SAVAGE SENTENCE The 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 bo unfaithful to the other and the neglected one may claim a hitter freedom. Let both find solace in more congenial arms, and the sentence is a savage one— For life. Even the reprieved murderer can look forward to

personal liberty again* Hss pnnishif ment is not so heavy as that for on* poor human mistake. Not only is the divorce law out hS! date, but the conjugal abuses it re* volves round have gone out of fashion. Men and women no longer do tho things they stand in the witness-box and say they do to set in motion the creaking apparatus of the law. Everyone but the King’s Proctor eccs ; through the farcical evidence of the* wife who seeks to prove that a mail, of breeding and education has used physical violence on her person, when the truth is that his appalling mean-i ness 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! There is no better reason for a divorce than a mutual desire to bo free. The argument about the welfare of children does not hold water, for i f there i* 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 be discussed in public, let them ho sound, reasonable grounds, which cn n be presented without lying and without shame. Let the high-spirited wife be free of the mean bully who degrades her womanhood. Let the peace-loving husband ril himself oF the shrewish scold wh.■* makes his days a misery and his nights a nightmare. What pain can a gay Lothario inflict in comparison with the ceaseless torment of the sullen husband, ridden . y the dark devils of jealousy and suspicion ? What havoc can the flirtations 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 the hard fist of the labour market—who turns the nroduct of brain and nerve and sweat into the mockery of ribbons and laces—who weaves the blackness of d&bt and despair round the husband tho law says she cannot rob? Let honest men and women free themselves quietly and decently of tlioi bully, the shrew, the lunatic, and the parasite. Let well-meaning men and women who have made a natural human mistake undo it and begin again. Let the divorce court cease to be a court of mock morals and become a court of honest few. Its horrid machinery is unclean, irnd ought to be scrapped. It is a foul blot on the fair face of British justice. It encourages lying in the witness-box and seeks to bid© the fact by the appointment of a- farcical gentleman' known as the King’s Procter, an official whose only logical pfeoe b b; a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.