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Otago Daily Times, Issue 19530, 13 July 1925, Page 6

AN AMERICAN PROBLEM. It may be a platitude that civilisation stands or falls by the sanctity of the marriage vow, but it is a platitude that has not yet sunk into the consciousness of the American nation. In the matter of matrimonial severances America has become a byword so that she is spoken of as “the land of divorce.” “The census reports of the United States,” it is recorded on the authority of the Sanctity of Marriage Association of New York, “with 48 codes and 62 causes of divorce, show the most rapid increase in divorces of any country, pagan or Christian, in the world.” It is because of this record that it has been deemed necessary to establish in America, singular among the countries of the world in this respect, an organisation for the preservation of the sanctity of marriage. Nevertheless, the existence of such a body indicates an awakening of the national conscience in the United States to the grave social menace resident in the facilities for procuring divorce and for re-marriage after the formal severance has been granted by the court. It is the latter aspect of the problem, more particularly, which has given rise to feelings of concern in the minds of the New York bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and it is to the task of devising a remedy under this head that they are now addressing themselves. * A large part of the trouble that is presented in the remarriage of divorced persons in America arises, of course, from a conflict in the laws of the various States. A writer in Current History recently described this condition of affairs as a scandal not only among Americans, but also throughout the rest of the world. How these legal diversities are going to be merged into one hartnonious Statute so that there shall be one law governing all the various States—over-riding a freedom of outlook in one and perhaps a narrow conservatism in another—is a problem which may well give the best brains in America food for anxious thought. Certain it is that the present position in America, where lawful or bigamous marriages are merely a matter of geography, stands in need of earnest examination if a malignant growth is to be excised from the heart of a great nation.