Marriage, considered by society as a necessary mode of union, is a contract governed by law.

In the eyes of Roman Catholics, marriage being a sacrament, which renders it indissoluble, divorce does not exist. According to this principle we must accept as a sacrament an earthly tie which touches more nearly on material than on spiritual questions. But it seems strange that the Church of Rome should teach men, by the voice of her servants, that human perfection consists in the acceptance of all the sacraments, and then forbid marriage—which would be, from a practical point of view, the most useful to them—to her representatives. In so doing, the Church creates an illogical exception to her imperious rule.

“From the psychological point of view,” says Dr. Toulouse, “marriage is the union, first through passion, then through sympathy, of two beings; from the social point of view, it represents a mutual effort towards reproduction.

“The union of feeling between two beings has not been too highly exalted by the poets. It manifests in the highest degree that selection which purifies the instinct of sex.

“This selection is in itself a proof of the free will which works—with restraining effect—on the tyranny of passion. Again, the woman, in giving herself to one only, demonstrates in the most striking manner that she belongs to, and can dispose of, herself.

“Sex freedom, then, which is a condition of evolution, is manifested most clearly in a marriage entered upon willingly by both parties. But the corollary to this is, that divorce should also be possible simply at the wish of both.”

Let us study divorce from the point of view of its utility. Divorce offers an advantage in preventing marriage from being regarded as an endless chain, a crushing yoke, or a prison deliberately chosen as a livelihood. It means, in fact, that people need not be tightly bound together who cannot bear so to live; it would put an end to what is sometimes extreme mental suffering, abolish dangers which sometimes lead to murder; in a word, it means escape from “the sentimental and emotional results of the indissolubility of marriage.”

The termination of miserable “marriages of convenience” would ensure for many a new life, the production of healthier children under normal conditions; from the social point of view, it would increase the value of the man and the woman.

How many live together for long years who are strangers to each other in body and soul! How many slaves of marriage there are, whose union is unnatural, childless, and made hideous by mutual hatred!

Why should one see, in the name of a religious principle, these infernos—whose tortures are as varied as they are crushing—perpetuated? Why should not reason, individual rights, be allowed to correct ill-chance, false calculations, and disappointed hopes?

Why should a woman, who no longer finds in her husband the moral support she needs, submit to the horrors of a long agony without defence, of perpetual strife in which she is miserably vanquished; on the other hand, why should the man who does not find in his wife the companion—or even the slave—he desired, see the way to happiness closed to him for ever?

Marriage is based on a contract. Every contract can be rectified, modified, or broken. In a compact, there must be mutual agreement; from the moment when the agreement ceases to be respected by either of the parties, it is naturally dissolved.

Before the establishment of divorce the husband and wife who lived on bad terms had to endure suffering worse than death, for nothing, I repeat, is to be compared with the torment of being tied, body and soul, in hatred, contempt, or even merely in indifference.

In former days, the independent-minded, those who feared not public opinion, or thought little of social conventions, went each their way, to live in a different dwelling—as happens still in certain countries (in Spain, for instance, where divorce does not exist; where legal separation is not even recognised); but though they might live apart, the marriage contract held none the less, and the question of fortune remained a grave problem for solution. It is the same to-day when, through worldly expediency, or weakness, an ill-assorted couple share a miserable life or seek solace in separation. The woman, married under the Napoleonic Code, cannot dispose of her dowry, and the man, on his side, cannot sell without his wife’s signature. The sociÉtÉ d’acquÊts (common property of married people) is a constant menace in a situation of this kind; one comes to think that it is of no use for a couple to economise for the sake of their heirs, for, when one of the two parties dies, the common property goes to the other. Another case, also serious, may occur. If either husband or wife incurs debts, these, under the law, become common to both, and it comes about that the one who has not run into debt finds him or herself compelled to meet the liabilities of the other!

What manifold complications, what openings for dissension, what accumulated vexations! Widowhood, widowerhood, seems the only deliverance from a desperate situation.

But there is something worse still. In a household completely at variance, weary with strife, the children have to look on at scenes which wound their belief in the love between husband and wife. In such a case they suffer through the absence of divorce, both from the moral standpoint and because they are deprived of property which should fall to them, since through the sociÉtÉ d’acquÊts—that stern claimant—the children’s capital cannot be increased.

If we pass from this array of facts to another, which concerns this unnatural life of two people, the evil is no less great.

From the time when life together has become impossible, the husband more or less openly substitutes illicit union for marriage, and most frequently takes to live with him the woman he has chosen as his new companion. Because the marriage contract remains unbroken, this is an insult to the wife, for his house is still her home by law.

Although in a case of separation, the wife almost always acts with greater circumspection and caution, she will find it difficult to prevent the echo of any attention she may accept from reaching the ears of her husband, or his knowledge that she gives willingly to another what she has yielded with such aversion to himself.

Divorce prevents this gratuitous insult to marriage. The advantages it offers exceed by far the disadvantages cited by the defenders of an institution which to-day has grown weak because it has remained unchanged in the midst of social evolution.

The enemies of divorce assert that it is the destroyer of the family. That is not so, for there are no more families to destroy. Frankly, honestly, where is the family of old, since the law of the majority has freed the child, since compulsory education has lessened the moral authority of parents, without perceptibly improving the mass of the people; since in the vast field of higher education boys and girls, through school life, become strangers to the authors of their being and are mainly indebted to the State for their training?

If hypocrisy were not at the bottom of the whole matter, it would be quickly seen that nothing remains of the family as a sacred institution.

Authority on the one side, submission on the other, are the exception; the sacrifices, too, which parents made in the past, to the point of forgetting their own well-being, have to-day no longer any reason for existing.

Yes, divorce is useful, necessary, moral. But it may, it should, become more so, and undergo modification. Divorce by mutual consent must become the remedy for evils which dishonour the human soul; victims of unhappy marriages should be able to dissolve their union without the most intimate details of two lives—poisoned by misunderstanding, incompatibility of temper, excess, cruelty, and insult—being made a prey to public curiosity, the malice of barristers, and the opinions of judges. Those liberated from their matrimonial prison, and ripened by experience, must be allowed to marry the beloved one who has loved, consoled, and helped them through the battle of their days.

Nine times out of ten, these new marriages would be happy, because the husband and wife would have had time to appreciate each other’s qualities, because they would have obeyed the law of love, escaped convention and not been guided, generally speaking, by interest, that chief and pernicious element in conflict between the sexes.

Divorce, as at present established, does not afford enough solutions for the melancholy problems resulting from marriage. It is inadmissible, inhuman, even immoral, that one who has suffered patiently twenty years “for the children’s sake” should be condemned, because he or she has left the torture-chamber, to pass the remainder of life without the right to create a new home and consecrate by marriage the affection and devotion which have healed the old wounds, given back joy in living, and created for him or her obligations at once moral and social.

The day when divorce shall become a law of justice, and no longer—as it sometimes is now—a tacit agreement covering wrongdoing; the day when divorce shall exist by the will of him or her who gives valid reasons for it, and also by mutual consent; the day, finally, when lover and beloved, under normal conditions, may marry, then true and rightful solutions will have been brought to impossible situations, and a noble work done for the individual and society at large.