vorce
is more frequent than elsewhere. For example, it is much more common in
the northern counties of Ohio settled largely from New England than in
the southern counties settled largely from the Middle Atlantic states.

There are two statements frequently made regarding divorce in the United
States which do not find warrant in the statistics on the subject. The
first is, that the real motive for divorce with one or both parties is
the desire for marriage to a third person. The second is, that a very
large proportion of divorces are granted to persons who move from one
jurisdiction to another in order to avail themselves of lax divorce
laws. On the first point the American statistics are practically silent,
since, in issuing a marriage licence to parties one or both of whom have
been previously divorced, no record is generally made of the fact. In
Connecticut, however, for a number of years this information was
required; and, if the statements were trustworthy, the number of persons
remarrying each year was about one-third the total number of persons
divorcing, which is probably a rate not widely different from that of
widows and widowers of the same age. Foreign figures for Switzerland,
Holland and Berlin indicate that in those regions the proportion of the
divorced who remarry speedily is about the same as that of widows and
widowers. What statistical evidence there is on the subject therefore
tends to discredit this popular opinion. The evidence on the second
point is more conclusive, and has gone far towards decreasing the demand
for a constitutional amendment allowing a federal marriage and divorce
law. About four-fifths of all the divorces granted in the United States
were issued to parties who were married in the state in which the decree
of divorce was later made; and when from the remaining one-fifth are
deducted those in which the parties migrated for other reasons than a
desire to obtain an easy divorce, the remainder would constitute a very
small, almost a negligible, fraction of the total number.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to say how far the frequency of
divorce in the United States has been or is a social injury; how far it
has weakened or undermined the ideal of marriage as a lifelong union
between man and woman. In this respect the question is very like that of
illegitimacy; and as the most careful students of the latter subject
agree that almost no trustworthy inference regarding the moral co