RECENT MAGISTERIAL VERDICT.

Taranaki Daily News, 24 December 1935, Page 7

RECENT MAGISTERIAL VERDICT.

(To the Editor.) Sir,— To-day’s Daily News contains « paragraph of a most controversial nature. It relates to a judicial pronouncement made by Mr. Stout, magistrate, in which he seems to have declared that a man had no right to marry again under the following circumstances: The man had married and had a family. Later the spouses were divorced, the husband' being ordered to maintain the children. Later again, he married again, and had another family, and his means becoming straightened the question was, “ought he to have married again while > being under the obligation to support his children?” The magistrate said “no,” My opinion is that the magistrate was wrong in so saying. To hold as the magistrate held is to condemn a man to celibacy—to lay upon such a man a prohibition that is against natural instinct#, to encourage concubinage and its attendant evils. Far better would it be for the State as a whole to realise this and to be willing to maintain any. children of a former marriage left unprovided for by the children of a subse- . quent one. It must be for the general good of the State that men and women should be free to inter-mdrry, and the Legislature, by making divorce relatively easy, must impliedly be taken to countenance re-marriages.—l am, etc., COELEBS. Hawera, Dec. • |23. • 1 “