wife,
or infidelity obstinately and offensively persisted in or endangering
health in the case of the husband, really injure the home sufficiently
to justify a divorce on the assumptions of our present argument. If we
are going to make the welfare of the children our criterion in these
matters, then our divorce law does in this direction already go too far.
A husband or wife may do far more injury to the home by constantly
neglecting it for the companionship of some outside person with whom no
"matrimonial offence" is ever committed. Of course, if our divorce law
exists mainly for the gratification of the fiercer sexual resentments,
well and good, but if that is so, let us abandon our pretence that
marriage is an institution for the establishment and protection of
homes. And while on the one hand existing divorce laws appear to be
obsessed by sexual offences, other things of far more evil effect upon
the home go without a remedy. There are, for example, desertion,
domestic neglect, cruelty to the children drunkenness or harmful
drug-taking, indecency of living and uncontrollable extravagance. I
cannot conceive how any logical mind, having once admitted the principle
of divorce, can hesitate at making these entirely home-wrecking things
the basis of effective pleas. But in another direction, some strain of
sentimentality in my nature makes me hesitate to go with the great
majority of divorce law reformers. I cannot bring myself to agree that
either a long term of imprisonment or the misfortune of insanity should
in itself justify a divorce. I admit the social convenience, but I wince
at the thought of those tragic returns of the dispossessed. So far as
insanity goes, I perceive that the cruelty of the law would but endorse
the cruelty of nature. But I do not like men to endorse the cruelty of
nature.

And, of course, there is no decent-minded person nowadays but wants to
put an end to that ugly blot upon our civilisation, the publication of
whatever is most spicy and painful in divorce court proceedings. It is
an outrage which falls even more heavily on the innocent than on the
guilty, and which has deterred hundreds of shy and delicate-minded
people from seeking legal remedies for nearly intolerable wrongs. The
sort of person who goes willingly to the divorce court to-day is the
sort of person who would love a screaming quarrel in a crowded street.
The emotional breach of the marriage bond is as private an affair as its