INCREASE OF DIVORCE.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume IV, Issue 1062, 1 October 1883, Page 2

INCREASE OF DIVORCE.

San Francisco Courts grant an average of one divorce a day. Ihis is a bad showing, but it is believed that it does not exhibit the full extent of the evil, owing to the practice of many attorneys and divorce! bureaux in instituting proceedings in outside counties in order to avoid publicity, or for other reasons best known to themselves. Furthermore the number of divorces granted is steadily increasing, and in a greater rati > than the increase of population. A growing laxity in popular ideas concerning the saeredness of the marriage tie is an acknowledged and dangerous feature of the times. The explanation that a new country and unsettled state of society are accountable for the prevalence of divorce in the West is insufficient, because it has been proved over and over again that among the worst sinners in this respect are the New England States, where society is neither new nor unsettled. The origin of the trouble is a growing inclination to treat marriage as merely a civil contract, dissoluble at the option of the parties. No State has gone the length of formally enacting that a marriage may be dissolved at the pleasure of the parties honored by if, but in an indirect (way that*has become the effect of the existing laws. Not to mentio i divorces fcr incompatibility of disposition, which are followed by some States, the law permitting absolute divorce for desertion and numerous other causes, in the absence of proper precautions against collusion, can be, and are, daily taken advantage of. to procure separation, with liberty to marry again, by parties whose only excuse is that they have tired of one another. This fact is patent, and a demand would go up for a speedy correction of the abuse were it not that society is coming to look with complacency upon the theory of marriage which regards it as a relation terminable at pleasure. It is this idea of marriage as a contract which forms the kernel of mischief. A contract is dissolved by the consent of the parties to it, and why should marriage constitute on exception to the rule? °That is the inquiry constantly heard, either in so many words or implied in the general tone of discussion. This conception of contract as applied to marriage is fundamentally wrong and does no end of mischief, and therefore we take pleasure in quoting what a good legal authority says on the subject, showing that marriage is something more than a civil contract: “Marriage is a civil status, existing in one man and one woman legally united for life for those civil and social purposes which are based in the distinction of sex. its source is the law of nature, whence it-has flowed into the municipal law of every civilised country and into the general law of nations. And since it can only exist in pairs, and since bo persons are compelled to, but all who

are capable are permitted to assume it, marriage maybe said to proceed from a. civil contract between one man and one t woman of the needful physical and civil capacity. While the contract remains executory that is, an agreement jto marry—it differs in no essential: particulars from other civil contracts. But when the contract becomes executed in what the law regards as a valid marriage, its. nature as a contract is merged in thehighor nature of the status. And though the new relation may retain some similitudes to remind us of its origin, the contract does in truth no longer exist, but the parties are governed by the law of husband-aod wife.”