CHAPTER XX

JUDGING from what may frequently be seen or overheard, it would seem as if there were an ignoble and disloyal conspiracy entered into by a class of our inhabitants, who exhibit, like Mephistopheles, the spirit of bitter mockery and of subtle and sophistical abuse of everything we do. Even our benefactions are held up to ridicule. These persons would appear to have the ear of the public, and, though they are not great in either numbers or ability, take advantage of every opportunity to pour their reptilian venom into ears so credulous that they regard every utterance of slander as Gospel verity. Such persons have no true historic perspective, being mere newspaper readers, who form their opinion of the times from the head-lines of scandal or the pulpit "eloquence" of denunciation, and interpret us accordingly.

To them, when there are not a half-dozen children in every family, it is because the ought-to-be-parents are experts in the arts of "race suicide," a vile phrase. They point to the promenades of native opulence which are filled with palaces and with circumambient gardens, and are occupied by established people beyond the age of child-bearing, who naturally have few children about them. They compare these abodes of the wellto-do with the nooks and alleys of closely set houses,

which are filled with young foreign people at the height of procreative activity, there being a married couple in every room, and the steps of each house being crowded with children. Then they claim that this is proof of the truthfulness of their slander.

This is the attitude of people who traduce us, and who have some ulterior purpose in our vilification. And we are as slow as snails crawling through tar in resenting the insult.

If churches are not packed to the doors with overcredulous multitudes, then the world is all agog with crime and disorder and we have become "a nation of agnostics, unitarians, and other infidels," on the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire. Yet a well-known Italian city, with a half a million inhabitants and with five hundred churches, open for divine service night and day, and some of them the most sumptuous and elaborate in the world, commits ten times more crimes of impudicity in a year than the same number of Americans, with far fewer churches, would commit in twenty years.

If a man expresses an independent religious thought in America to-day, then the land is heralded to the four winds as being full of skepticism, as having abandoned the Christian verities and cut the bond binding it to the Infinite. If some deluded woman elopes with another woman's husband, or if "Miss Romance" runs away with her father's coachman, or if " Madame Frivolity" resorts to the imbecility of promiscuous divorce, the "sanctity of the home is gone forever "—

and we are all but "waiting for opportunities of Mormon liberality."

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If a crowd of boys help themselves to a few bunches of grapes growing on another man's vine, and run away hooting from the pursuing policeman, then children were never worse," and respect for authority" and "parental reverence" have vanishedand oh! the multiplied horrors of divorce!! as if we were the performers in a comic opera, with everybody just waiting for the moment of a midnight elopement - and so on ad infinitum.

To be sure there is room for improvement. But can it not be seen by what we have presented of the past that the world is not getting worse but better, that we are rather angels in the home of domestic propriety as compared with older times, when history was a series of domestic horrors, and when enthroned authority set the worst example?

If the reader is not convinced that the people to-day, especially in America, are living better lives than were ever lived before, then he must indeed be the slave of an exploded theory, and believe that God made a mistake in creating us. For that reader at least this unpretentious volume is but hollow vanity.

We believe, and modern Christians in America believe, notwithstanding printed contradiction, that promiscuous divorce is inconsistent with the highest ethics, and is usually but an imbecility of the futile and incapable. We believe, too, that there are even divorced persons married again in America, contrary to the re

ligious standard of the land, who are living as loyally to their sacred obligations as did the people of any age, when marriage was regarded as a sacrament, and when entrenched authority, contrary to the teachings of Christ, declared it indissoluble. And we believe, too, that the time will come when unsanctified divorce will be exfoliated from the national life, just as the skin is from the body of a person convalescing from an eruptive fever.

Such conditions are as common among the youth of nations as among the youth of humanity.

What the world needs as a barrier in the way of unnecessary divorce in America is the adoption of the religion of Jesus by all the people. With the acceptance of Christ's teaching there would be no need of additional legislation.

But this seems impossible, or, under present circumstances, extremely difficult. The next best remedy, to paraphrase from a great legal authority, would be that since wedlock is a natural right, to be forfeited only by some wrong on the part of either contracting party, the central government should permit every suitable person who will substantially perform the duties of the matrimonial relation, to be the husband or wife of another. This should be done by the enactment of just laws, which should be uniform in all the States. When this matrimonial relation is entered into in good faith, and one of the parties to it so far fails in the duties involved as practically to frustrate its ends, the government should provide some means by which the

innocent party may be freed from the mere legal bond of what in fact has ceased to be marriage, and be left at liberty to form another alliance. The delinquent's failure should be fully established and shown to be permanent and in no way due to the fault of the other party. And the delinquent should have no claim to be protected in a second marriage. Whether it should be permitted to him or not is not a question of right to him, but of public expediency.

UNIV. OF MICHIGAN

FEB 24 1914