DIVORCE IN BRITAIN.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19260, 26 August 1924, Page 8

DIVORCE IN BRITAIN.

SINNING AGAINST THE MARRIAGE BOND. Last year Great Britain, after more than 50 years of loyalty to her old divorce law, which dales back to 1827 and which recognised only the one Biblical cause for divorce (admitting also ill treatment and desertion if the woman is seeking a decree), finally made the terms identical for men and women, states Current History. It is no longer obhga tory for the husband to beat and desert as well as betray his wife. He has only to sin against the marriage bond. And that, in England, is thought to be a long step. It is not to be supposed that English men and women have been any more honest or willingly indecent than we have in furnishing evidence that would satisfy the court. It lias not come easy to England, however, thus to circumvent tho law. English tradition and psychology are all for obeying it. In England they look with scandalised horror upon our easy American indifference'to mwbreaking. So when England found that the old divorce law was beginning to pinch and, worse than that, was encouraging lawlessness, it took steps to liberalise it. But those steps have been long and slow of accomplishment. The man in the street does not remember just Low long ago the Royal Divorce Commission began its labours, but it was long enough, at least, to have produced several great tomes of findings, which the British Museum lays out before you with a good deal of conscious pride. , Not many countries have done the thing as thoroughly as that. But progress was mostly confined to reporting, for the leisurely labours of the Royal Commissions are not unlike those of like bodies in our own republican land. They are only the beginning. Lords and Commons must accept or reject. And the majority report of the Royal Commission on divorce has been used as a football back and forth between the two Houses till the people almost gave up hope. The year 1925 marked the first triumph of the liberalising divorce movement in Great Britain.