pleasure, and the belief that every one has a right to it, seem to be stronger and more widely diffused than ever before. Some will perhaps add that, in an age when the belief in a future state of rewards and punishments is less deep and less general than it once was, the desire to have out of this life all the pleasure it can be made to yield is naturally stronger; yet I doubt whether beliefs regarding a future life have ever influenced men's conduct so much as the whilom universality of those beliefs might lead us to assume.

All these tendencies are partly due to, and are certainly much increased by, that aggregation of population into great cities which makes one of the most striking contrasts between our time and the ages which formed English and American character. It is in industrial and progressive communities, such as those of Germany, Belgium, France, and England, that these tendencies are most pervasive and effective. They are even more pervasive and multiform in the United States than in Europe. It would be strange indeed if they did not affect the theory and the practice of domestic relations and the conception of the family. And their influence will evidently be greatest in the country where the ideas of democratic equality, and the notion that every human being may claim certain indefeasible human rights,' have struck deepest root.

The idea that men and women are entitled to happiness, and therefore to have barriers to their happiness removed, is strong in the United States, and has gone far to prompt both the indulgence of the laws and the over-indulgence shown in administering them. This idea has its good side. The fuller recognition of the right of women to develop their individuality and be more than mere appendages to men is one of the conspicuous gains which the last two or three generations have brought. It has helped to raise the conception of what marriage should be, so we must expect to find that it has made women less tolerant of an unsym

pathetic or unworthy partner than they were in the eighteenth century.

It would not therefore be wonderful if, even apart from such facilities as legislation has allowed, and assuming that there was one and the same divorce law over all civilized countries, the United States should show, as Switzerland shows in Europe, an exceptionally high percentage of divorces to marriages. Newspapers are more read there than in any other country; and newspapers contain a great deal about matrimonial troubles which would be better left unpublished. The life of the middle class is more full of stir and change and excitement than it is in Europe. Both the process described as the emancipation of women, and the admission of women to various professions and employments formerly confined to men, have gone further there than in Europe. So has the carrying on of industries in factories instead of at home. So has the habit of living in hotels or boarding-houses.

All these conditions are less favourable than were the conditions of a century ago to the maintenance of domestic life on the old lines. And over and above these, there has come that extreme laxity of the law and of judicial procedure which has been already described. Thus we can easily account for the comparative frequency of divorce in the United States, while yet noting, for this is the point of real importance, that the phenomena of the United States are not isolated, but merely the most conspicuous instance of a tendency which is at work everywhere, and which springs from some widely diffused features of modern life.

The points of similarity between the history of divorce at Rome and its history in recent times need not be further insisted on. There is, however, one to which I have not yet adverted. At Rome the increase of conjugal infidelity and that of divorce would seem, from such data as law and literature give us, to have gone on

together, each fostering the other. Is there any like connexion discoverable now?

This is a question which it appears impossible to answer either generally or for any particular country. There are no statistics available, except for matrimonial causes coming into the Courts, and we can never tell what proportion the offences that are disclosed bear to those which remain hidden. There have been countries where the level of sexual morality was extremely low, at least among the wealthier classes, though no divorce was permitted. There may be countries where the very fact that the level is low keeps down the number of applications to the Court, because the injured party acquiesces and takes his or her revenge in like offences. Common talk, and literature which as regards the past may sometimes represent nothing more than common talk 1, are unsafe guides, as any one will see who asks himself how much he knows about the moral state of his own country in his own time. He can form some sort of guess about the character of the 'social set' he moves in, but how little after all does he know about the classes above or below his own! Thus there can be very few persons in England whose means of information entitle them to say that the undoubted increase of divorce cases in our Courts since 1860 represents any decline in the average conjugal morality of the people. As regards the United States, I have heard the most opposite views expressed with equal confidence by persons who ought to have been equally well-informed. Judicial statistics do not prove that infidelity has become more common there, for the largest proportion of divorces granted is for desertion, 38.5 per cent. of the whole, those for infidelity being little more than half of that percentage, or about one-fifth of the whole.

1 Sometimes not even that. A few years ago, in the United States Senate, some one quoted, in order to prove the corruption of public life in England, a play represented there, in which a Secretary of State or his wife was involved in a disgraceful job connected with an Indian railway. Nobody in England had taken such a thing seriously enough to comment on the absurdity of it.

At the same time the smallness of this percentage may count for less than might appear, for it is probable that in States where divorce can be obtained for other grounds, less serious and easier to prove than infidelity is, petitioners will, where they have a choice of several charges to make, put forward a less grave charge provided it is sufficient to secure their object. So far as my own information goes, the practical level of sexual morality is at least as high in the United States as in any part of northern or western Europe (except possibly among the Roman Catholic peasantry of Ireland), and experienced judges in America have told me that, odious as they find the divorce work of their courts, the thing which strikes them in the cases they deal with is more frequently the caprice and fickleness, the irritability and querulous discontent of couples who have married on some passing fancy, than a proclivity to breaches of wedded troth.

Indeed, so far from holding that marriages are more frequently unhappy in the United States than in western Europe, most persons who know both countries hold the opposite to be the case. On the whole, therefore, there seems no ground for concluding that the increase of divorce in America necessarily points to a decline in the standard of domestic morality, except perhaps in a small section of the wealthy class, though it must be admitted that if this increase should continue, it may tend to induce such a decline.

The same conclusion may well be true regarding the greater frequency of divorce all over the world. There is no reason to think that sexual passion leading to conjugal infidelity is any commoner than formerly among mankind. More probably passion is tending to grow rather weaker than it was formerly. But that which we call Individualism, viz. the desire of each person to do what he or she pleases, to gratify his or her tastes, likings, caprices, to lead a life which shall be uncontrolled v another's will-this grows stronger. So, too, what

ever stimulates the susceptibility and sensitiveness of the nervous system tends to make tempers more irritable, and to produce causes of friction between those who are in constant contact. Here is a source of trouble that is likely to grow with the growing strain of life, and with the larger proportion which other interests bear in modern life to those home interests which formerly absorbed nearly the whole of a woman's thoughts. It is temper rather than unlawful passion that may prove in future the most dangerous enemy to the stability of the marriage relation.

XXII. INFLUENCE OF THE CHURCH AND THE LAW.

The view of marriage as a tie which the parties intend to enter into for their lives, and which the law holds indissoluble, has hitherto rested not so much on any abstract theory or sentiment which men and women have entertained regarding it as upon the three authorities which have formed both sentiment and opinion. These three are the Church, the State, and Tradition, that is to say the beliefs which people adopt because they have come down from the past. The attitude of the Church has in Protestant nations sensibly altered. In some countries it altered in the sixteenth century. It has everywhere altered in the nineteenth. So, too, the support given to the old view by the State has in like manner become in those same countries much weaker, and in some countries, as for example in Switzerland and many American States, has almost disappeared. Public opinion has itself been largely formed. by the Church and the Law, and may, when they have ceased to form it, be no longer an effective guardian of the permanence and dignity of marriage. In such democracies as those of the United States, the wish of an active minority to procure changes in the law easily prevails, because no one cares to resist, and because abstract principles suggest that the more everybody is