HASTY WAR MARRIAGES.

Taihape Daily Times, 24 January 1918, Page 7

HASTY WAR MARRIAGES.

EVIL ACCENTUATED BY CHEAPER LICENCES.

An English paper states: Many have been the tragic mistakes made by this country during the war. Perhaps the greatest is that of encouraging hasty

war marriages. Everything possible is being done to facilitate unions among soldiers and girls between whom has arisen a transitory affection which ignores ignorance of each other’s true character and circumstances of life. In a few weeks, often in a few days, conies the awakening. and two young lives arc blighted. Tragedies iunnumcrablo have been brought about in this way. Typical is the case of a young girl almost i a child, who, attracted, by tire glamour of khaki and a handsome face, married a young officer whom she had known for only two months. Too late she discovered that her husband’s family had for several generations manifested strong traits of insanity, and that one of his sisters was an inmate of an asylum. A closer acquaintance with her husbad revealed the fact that he too, exhibited signs of the terrible family taint, which was rapidly developing and to add tragedy to her already terrible plight, a deformed child was born

Even worse than this arc the circumstances of many other eases that have recently come to light. A further reduction recently made in the marriage licence fees will not tend to better this state of affairs. Hasty marriages are on the increase, and are likely to become still more numerous as the war continues. A curious feature of this new and viral problem, which will undoubtedly produce disastrous effects in the near future, is the attitude of the Church While raising no objections to these thousands of marriages between people who are little more than strang- j ers, it cries loudly against the incrcas- | lag, tendency to facilitate divorce.

Yes if the present deplorable marriage boom is to continue means must be devised to enable the thousands of

.wrilusioncd couples to escape from lifelong misery, and degradation or the primary object for which these marriages arc being facilitated—the increase of the birth rate—will be defeated. Worse than that, it will leod to terrible increase in illicit unions, immorality and in the number of illegitimate children.

j.lio unfortunate results of war marriages have already been recognised by the authorities and the Poor Persons Department recently established at the Law Courts for enabling those unions to bo dissolved is the result. “Wo deplore these hasty marriages’’ said Mrs. Scaton-Ticdeman, secretary of the Divorce Law Reform Union, the more so because of the difficulty of dissolving them. The tragic results re"v ealed in instances brought to the notice of the union are appalling. Such reforms as we demand, far from lowezing the standard of morality, are necessary to its interests, and consequently to the mo,ral well-being of the State.”