Life — February 8, 1906 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“ While there is Life there’s Hope.” VOL. XLVI. FEB. 8, 1908. No. 1215. West Tuirty-Finst Street, New York. IFE’S attitude on divorce grieves some of its friends, Let us take a bit of coun- sel together on that ject Lire’s cartoon a fortnight ago expressed in a eneral way the opinion that divorce was being attacked with overmuch zeal, espe- cially by some of the clergy So it is, but it is hard to get all the ject sub- spects of a large sub- into a single picture. Divorce exists as a consequence of marriage and for its protec- tion. In so far as it makes mar- riage more desirable, safer and more tory it is a good thing. In so far as it makes marriage less honor- able and less secure it is an evil thing. Its purpose is medicinal—to cure a dis- It is mighty bad medicine, ex- disagreeable to take, and i able if overused to get the taker into a bad habit, but it is the only remedy for the particular disease it attempts to cure, and while its use ought to be carefully regulated, it is a mistake to restrain it too much, and a worse mis- take to prohibit it altogether. There is everything to make people once married stay married if they can, and a great majority of the people who marry do stay married. Considering what a gamble marriage necessarily is, it is much more surprising that there are so many durable and_ satisfactory marriages, than that there are some that fail. Now, as to those that fail. There are marriages where one partner is worthy and the other hopelessly unfit; others where neither partner is worthy: and others st! where both are decent but hopelessly mismated. Perhaps the strongest at- gument in favor of dissolving all these marriages is that children born of them are not likely to be of value to society. What of a good woman who constrains herself for conscience sake to bear children to a degenerate man? case ccedir -LIFE: Is that de to society ? ree of toleration a service To be sure, a legal separa- tion is a remedy for that, but it is an incomplete one, It is not fair that a decent person who innocently and in good faith has stumbled into a mar- riage that has turned out, through no fault of that person, to be impossible, should be debarred ever after from any true and satisfactory experience of do- life. Those of our clerical brethren who maintain that it is cer tainly pleasing to the Almighty that divorced persons should never re- marry, scem to have extraordinarily little foundation on which to base that belief. The Great Teacher, on whose recorded sayings the Christian world bases its standards of conduct, spoke no word that warranied such a conelu- sion, and if one design of the Creator is clearer than another, it is the pur- pose that His human creatures should be mated. in one way or another, if not by hu- man laws, by the automatic action of the greater laws that rule creation, but the in ion of artificial rules to pun- ish innocence and misfortune ite superfluous in a world where in tune mestic Sin usually gets punished seems nocence and mis ready have troubles enough. “>VG ea Vi AWS me HEN neither party to a marriage is worthy, what does it matter whether they live together or live apart, whether they divorce or not, whether they remarry and redivoree or not? Laws made to protect decent folk and win them fair play in their pursuit. of happiness cannot be ex- pected to constrain trifling and incon- stant minds or undisciplined and seli- indulgent natures into paths of recti- tude and honor, Are the marital in- discretions of the foolish and the brutish of such surpassing moment that the just and the kind must be held by bonds devised for them? And even the hopelessly mismated people sometimes do better on a sec- ond trial, Honest folk who think them- selves mismated and are still too proud or too strong to confess failure, often prove their own forebodings to have been wrong vy winning happiness out of adverse conditions by sheer force of character. That is a splendid feat, but the incompatible people who cannot ac- complish it do occasionally better themselves by cutting loose and try- ing again. Do the interests of society really require us to condemn a rear- rangement which, without injustice to any individual, enables people who have lived unhappily, to better their lives? VER wise or unwise our views of divorce in the abstract may be, we are apt to be fairly sen- sible, according to our lights, when the abstract becomes concrete, We judge every separate divorce on its merits in ir as we know the facts, realizing always that to know all the facts about any disagreement of man and wife is usually impossible. Some divorced persons we hold blameless; some w blame, but not without sympathy; some we hold to be dishonored, and a good many we regard with much more amusement than concern. There are good marriages and bad ones, and good and bad divorces. A good mar- riage will always and easily beat the best divorce that ever was, but a good divorce will sometimes beat a bad marriage. So long as marriage is so popular and delectable a condition, and divorce is unpopular and always on its defense, we fail to see why there is so much distrust of the ability of mar- riage to hold its own in society, and why so much fear that divorce will run it out of the game. And we con- fess that though the dealings of the State—or, more accurately, the States —with divorce are faulty enough, and though the influence of the churches in favor of the durability of marriage is useful, we would hate to see the control of marriage pass from the State to the churches. Good people make good marriages. It is the constituent material that counts, not the rules. When religion or legislation has made all the people good, there won't be any divorce ques- tion. comicbooks.com