y, and the
failure of separation orders to enable the separated parties to
marry again. Separation orders are granted by magistrates for
cruelty, adultery, and desertion. This "separation" is really the
direct descendant of the Canon law divorce _a mensa et thoro_,
and the inability to marry which it involves is merely a survival
of the Canon law tradition. At the present time
magistrates--exercising their discretion, it is admitted, in a
careful and prudent manner--issue some 7,000 separation orders
annually, so that every year the population is increased by
14,000 individuals mostly in the age of sexual vigor, and some
little more than children, who are forbidden by law to form legal
marriages. They contribute powerfully to the great forward
movement which, as was shown in the previous chapter, marks the
morality of our age. But it is highly undesirable that free
marriages should be formed, helplessly, by couples who have no
choice in the matter, for it is unlikely that under such
circumstances any high level of personal responsibility can be
reached. The matter could be easily remedied by dropping
altogether a Canon law tradition which no longer has any vitality
or meaning, and giving to the magistrate's separation order the
force of a decree of divorce.

New Zealand and the Australian colonies, led by Victoria in 1889,
have passed divorce laws which, while more or less framed on the
English model, represent a distinct advance. Thus in New Zealand
the grounds for divorce are adultery on either side, wilful
desertion, habitual drunkenness, and conviction to imprisonment
for a term of years.

It is natural that an Englishman should feel acutely sensitive to this
blot in the law of England and desire the speedy disappearance of a system
so open to scathing sarcasm. It is natural that every humane person should
grow impatient of the spectacle of so many blighted lives, of so much
misery inflicted on innocent persons--and on persons who even when
technically guilty are often the victims of unnatural circumstances--by
the persistence of a mediaeval system of ecclesiastical tyranny and
inquisitorial insolence into an age when sexual relationships are becoming
regarded as the sacred secret of the persons intimately concerned, and
when more and more we rely on the responsibility of the individual in
making and mainta