ship of
plaintiff and defendant is not a totally false and artificial
relationship, an immoral legal fiction. In most cases, if the truth were
fully known, husband and wife should come side by side to the divorce
court and declare: "We are both in the wrong: we have not been able to
fulfil our engagements to each other; we have erred in choosing each
other." The long reports of the case in open court, the mutual
recriminations, the detectives, the servant girls and other witnesses, the
infamous inquisition into intimate secrets--all these things, which no
necessity could ever justify, are altogether unnecessary.

It is said by some that if there were no impediments to divorce a man
might be married in succession to half a dozen women. These simple-minded
or ignorant persons do not seem to be aware that even when marriage is
absolutely indissoluble a man can, and frequently does, carry on sexual
relationships not merely successively, but, if he chooses, even
simultaneously, with half a dozen women. There is, however, this important
difference that, in the one case, the man is encouraged by the law to
believe that he need only treat at most one of the six women with anything
approaching to justice and humanity; in the other case the law insists
that he shall fairly and openly fulfil his obligations towards all the six
women. It is a very important difference, and there ought to be no
question as to which state of things is moral and which immoral. It is no
concern of the State to inquire into the number of persons with whom a man
or a woman chooses to have sexual relationships; it is a private matter
which may indeed affect their own finer spiritual development but which it
is impertinent for the State to pry into. It is, however, the concern of
the State, in its own collective interest and that of its members, to see
that no injustice is done.

But what about the children? That is necessarily a very important
question. The question of the arrangements made for the children in cases
of divorce is always one to which the State must give its regulative
attention, for it is only when there are children that the State has any
real concern in the matter.

At one time it was even supposed by some that the existence of children
was a serious argument against facility of divorce. A more reasonable view
is now generally taken. It is, in the first place, recognized that a very
large proportion of couples seeking divorce have no c