r West and Southwest, with
the exception of New Mexico (Roman Catholic) and Utah (Mormon). The
chart showing the relation of divorces to number of married population
does not materially differ. Now these figures, ranging from five
hundred divorces per hundred thousand married population per year, or
three hundred in the more lax States, down to less than fifty in the
stricter States, compare with other countries as follows:

[Footnote 1: Census Reports, 1909, "Marriage and Divorce," part I, p.
15.]

Only Japan shows a number of divorces approaching these figures.
She has two hundred and fifteen per one hundred thousand of general
population,--about the same as Indiana, which stands eighth in the
order of States. But with the exception of Japan no civilized country
shows anything like the proportion of divorces that the American
States do. Thus, in Great Britain and Ireland there are but two per
hundred thousand of population; in Scotland, four; in the German
Empire, fifteen; in France, twenty-three, and in the highest country
of all, Switzerland, thirty-two, while the average of the entire
United States is seventy-three.

The census figures as to the trades or professions in which divorce
is most prevalent are amusing, but probably not very significant. It
appears, as might be expected, that actors and actresses stand at the
head, and next musicians or teachers of music; while clergymen stand
very near the bottom of the list, only excelled in this good record
by bar-tenders (in Rhode Island) and, throughout the country, by
agricultural laborers.

But after all, more important, perhaps, than even marriage and
divorce, are the great social changes which arise from the general
engaging of women in industrial occupation. In matters of property
right we have found they are substantially already on an equality
with men, if not in a position of special privilege. Yet, as Herbert
Spencer remarked, "When an abuse which has existed for many centuries
is at last on the point of disappearing, the most violent outcry
is made against it." During the century when women were really
oppressed,[1] under the power of the husband, given no rights as to
their property, their children, or hardly even as to their person,
no complaint was heard. Whereas to-day the cry of unjust legislation
almost rises to a shriek. The movement for the emancipation of women
originated, of course, with Mary Wolstonecraft, about 1812. Her book,
which was t