Special Report of the United States Census Office, 1909, published
early in 1910, makes a careful and elaborate study of the whole
question from the years 1867 to 1906. Such statistics are necessarily
uncertain for reasons already indicated. Court judgments do not
indicate the true cause of divorce, nor is the complainant necessarily
the innocent party, nor are the numbers of divorces granted, as for
instance in Nevada, any fair indication of the normal divorce rate of
the people really living in that State. With this caution we will note
that the number of divorces varied from about five hundred in each
hundred thousand of married population every year in Washington,
Montana, Colorado, Arkansas, Texas, Oregon, Wyoming, Indiana, Idaho,
and Oklahoma, down to less than fifty, or about one-tenth as many, in
New Jersey, New York, and Delaware. Certain significant observations
may certainly be made upon this table. In the first place, the
older States, the old thirteen, have, from the point of view of the
conservative or divorce reformer, the best record. At the head
stand the three States just named, then North Carolina, Georgia,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts, Louisiana (largely
French and Roman Catholic), and Connecticut--ten of the original
thirteen States. Only New Hampshire and Rhode Island, the latter for
obvious reasons, stand low down in the column; the last State having
about three hundred divorces as against Montana's five hundred. South
Carolina, having no divorces at all, does not appear.

The next observation one is compelled to make is that divorces are
most numerous in the women's suffrage States, or in the States
neighboring, where "women's rights" notions are most prevalent.
Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho stand second, third, sixth, and
eighth, respectively, among the fifty States and Territories comprised
in the table.[1] On succeeding pages are graphic maps showing the
conditions which in this particular prevail for a number of years.
There is little change of these in the thirty years from 1870 to 1900.
The Atlantic seaboard and Southern States in 1870 are left white, with
the exception of New England, which is slightly shaded; that is,
they have less than twenty-five divorces per hundred thousand of
inhabitants. In 1880 the black belt States and Territories--having one
hundred and over--extends from Wyoming over Montana, Colorado, Utah,
and Nevada. In 1900 it covers the entire fa