The author of an able and temperate essay on The Question of English Divorce, summing up the characteristics of the English divorce law, concludes that it is: (1) unequal, (2) immoral, (3) contradictory, (4) illogical, (5) uncertain, and (6) unsuited to present requirements. It was only grudgingly introduced in a bill, presented to Parliament in 1857, which was stubbornly resisted during a whole session, not only on religious grounds by the opponents of divorce, but also by the friends of divorce, who desired a more liberal measure. It dealt with the sexes unequally, granting the husband but not the wife divorce for adultery alone. In introducing the bill the Attorney-General apologized for this defect, stating that the measure was not intended to be final, but merely as a step towards further legislation. That was more than half a century ago, but the further step has not yet been taken. Incomplete and unsatisfactory as the measure was, it seems to have been regarded by many as revolutionary and dangerous in the highest degree. The author of an article on "Modern Divorce" in the Universal Review for July, 1859, while approving in principle of the establishment of a special Divorce Court, yet declared that the new court was "tending to destroy marriage as a social institution and to sap female chastity," and that "everyone now is a husband and wife at will." "No one," he adds, "can now justly quibble at a deficiency of matrimonial vomitories."
Yet, according to this law, it is not even possible for a wife to obtain a divorce for her husband's adultery, unless he is also cruel or deserts her. At first "cruelty" meant physical cruelty and of a serious kind. But in course of time the meaning of the word was extended to pain inflicted on the mind, and now coldness and neglect may almost of themselves constitute cruelty, though the English court has sometimes had the greatest hesitation in accepting the most atrocious forms of refined cruelty, because it involved no "physical" element. "The time may very reasonably be looked forward to, however," a legal writer has stated (Montmorency, "The Changing Status of a Married Woman," Law Quarterly Review, April, 1897), "when almost any act of misconduct will, in itself, be considered to convey such mental agony to the innocent party as to constitute the cruelty requisite under the Act of 1857." (The question of cruelty is fully discussed in J. R. Bishop's Commentaries on Marriage, Divorce and Separation, 1891, vol. i, Ch. XLIX; cf. Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 111).
There can be little doubt, however, that cruelty alone is a reasonable cause for divorce. In many American States, where the facilities for divorce are much greater than in England, cruelty is recognized as itself sufficient cause, whether the wife or the husband is the complainant. The acts of cruelty alleged have sometimes been seemingly very trivial. Thus divorces have been pronounced in America on the ground of the "cruel and inhuman conduct" of a wife who failed to sew her husband's buttons on, or because a wife "struck plaintiff a violent blow with her bustle," or because a husband does not cut his toe-nails, or because "during our whole married life my husband has never offered to take me out riding. This has been a source of great mental suffering and injury." In many other cases, it must be added, the cruelty inflicted by the husband, even by the wife—for though usually, it is not always, the husband who is the brute—is of an atrocious and heart-rending character (Report on Marriage and Divorce in the United States, issued by Hon. Carroll D. Wright, Commissioner of Labor, 1889). But even in many of the apparently trivial cases—as of a husband who will not wash, and a wife who is constantly evincing a hasty temper—it must be admitted that circumstances which, in the more ordinary relationships of life may be tolerated, become intolerable in the intimate relationship of sexual union. As a matter of fact, it has been found by careful investigation that the American courts weigh well the cases that come before them, and are not careless in the granting of decrees of divorce.
In 1859 an exaggerated importance was attached to the gross reasons for divorce, to the neglect of subtle but equally fatal impediments to the continuance of marriage. This was pointed out by Gladstone, who was opposed to making adultery a cause of divorce at all. "We have many causes," he said, "more fatal to the great obligation of marriage, as disease, idiocy, crime involving punishment for life." Nowadays we are beginning to recognize not only such causes as these, but others of a far more intimate character which, as Milton long ago realized, cannot be embodied in statutes, or pleaded in law courts. The matrimonial bond is not merely a physical union, and we have to learn that, as the author of The Question of English Divorce (p. 49) remarks, "other than physical divergencies are, in fact, by far the most important of the originating causes of matrimonial disaster."
In England and Wales more husbands than wives petition for divorce, the wives who petition being about 40 per cent, of the whole. Divorces are increasing, though the number is not large, in 1907 about 1,300, of whom less than half remarried. The inadequacy of the divorce law is shown by the fact that during the same year about 7,000 orders for judicial separation were issued by magistrates. These separation orders not only do not give the right to remarry, but they make it impossible to obtain divorce. They are, in effect, an official permission to form relationships outside State marriage.
In the United States during the years 1887-1906 nearly 40 per cent, of the divorces granted were for "desertion," which is variously interpreted in different States, and must often mean a separation by mutual consent. Of the remainder, 19 per cent, were for unfaithfulness, and the same proportion for cruelty; but while the divorces granted to husbands for the infidelity of their wives are nearly three times as great proportionately as those granted to wives for their husband's adultery, with regard to cruelty it is the reverse, wives obtaining 27 per cent, of their divorces on that ground and husbands only 10 per cent.
In Prussia divorce is increasing. In 1907 there were eight thousand divorces, the cause in half the cases being adultery, and in about a thousand cases malicious desertion. In cases of desertion the husbands were the guilty parties nearly twice as often as the wives, in cases of adultery only a fifth to an eighth part.
There cannot be the slightest doubt that the difficulty, the confusion, the inconsistency, and the flagrant indecency which surround divorce and the methods of securing it are due solely and entirely to the subtle persistence of traditions based, on the one hand, on the Canon law doctrines of the indissolubility of marriage and the sin of sexual intercourse outside marriage, and, on the other hand, on the primitive idea of marriage as a contract which economically subordinates the wife to the husband and renders her person, or at all events her guardianship, his property. It is only when we realize how deeply these traditions have become embedded in the religious, legal, social and sentimental life of Europe that we can understand how it is that barbaric notions of marriage and divorce can to-day subsist in a stage of civilization which has, in many respects, advanced beyond such notions.
The Canon law conception of the abstract religious sanctity of matrimony, when transferred to the moral sphere, makes a breach of the marriage relationship seem a public wrong; the conception of the contractive subordination of the wife makes such a breach on her part, and even, by transference of ideas, on his part, seem a private wrong. These two ideas of wrong incoherently flourish side by side in the vulgar mind, even to-day.
The economic subordination of the wife as a species of property significantly comes into view when we find that a husband can claim, and often secure, large sums of money from the man who sexually approaches his property, by such trespass damaging it in its master's eyes.[339] To a psychologist it would be obvious that a husband who has lacked the skill so to gain and to hold his wife's love and respect that it is not perfectly easy and natural to her to reject the advances of any other man owes at least as much damages to her as she or her partner owes to him; while if the failure is really on her side, if she is so incapable of responding to love and trust and so easy a prey to an outsider, then surely the husband, far from wishing for any money compensation, should consider himself more than fully compensated by being delivered from the necessity of supporting such a woman. In the absence of any false traditions that would be obvious. It might not, indeed, be unreasonable that a husband should pay heavily in order to free himself from a wife whom, evidently, he has made a serious mistake in choosing. But to ordain that a man should actually be indemnified because he has shown himself incapable of winning a woman's love is an idea that could not occur in a civilized society that was not twisted by inherited prejudice.[340] Yet as matters are to-day there are civilized countries in which it is legally possible for a husband to enter a prayer for damages against his wife's paramour in combination with either a petition for judicial separation or for dissolution of wedlock. In this way adultery is not a crime but a private injury.[341]
At the same time, however, the influence of Canon law comes inconsistently to the surface and asserts that a breach of matrimony is a public wrong, a sin transformed by the State into something almost or quite like a crime. This is clearly indicated by the fact that in some countries the adulterer is liable to imprisonment, a liability scarcely nowadays carried into practice. But exactly the same idea is beautifully illustrated by the doctrine of "collusion," which, in theory, is still strictly observed in many countries. According to the doctrine of "collusion" the conditions necessary to make the divorce possible must on no account be secured by mutual agreement. In practice it is impossible to prevent more or less collusion, but if proved in court it constitutes an absolute impediment to the granting of a divorce, however just and imperative the demand for divorce may be.
The English Divorce Act of 1857 refused divorce when there was collusion, as well as when there was any countercharge against the petitioner, and the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1860 provided the machinery for guaranteeing these bars to divorce. This question of collusion is discussed by G. P. Bishop (op. cit., vol. ii, Ch. IX). "However just a cause may be," Bishop remarks, "if parties collude in its management, so that in real fact both parties are plaintiffs, while by the record the one appears as plaintiff and the other as defendant, it cannot go forward. All conduct of this sort, disturbing to the course of justice, falls within the general idea of fraud on the court. Such is the doctrine in principle everywhere."
It is quite evident that from the social or the moral point of view, it is best that when a husband and wife can no longer live together, they should part amicably, and in harmonious agreement effect all the arrangements rendered necessary by their separation. The law ridiculously forbids them to do so, and declares that they must not part at all unless they are willing to part as enemies. In order to reach a still lower depth of absurdity and immorality the law goes on to say that if as a matter of fact they have succeeded in becoming enemies to each other to such an extent that each has wrongs to plead against the other party they cannot be divorced at all![342] That is to say that when a married couple have reached a degree of separation which makes it imperatively necessary, not merely in their own interests but in the moral interests of society, that they should be separated and their relations to other parties concerned regularized, then they must on no account be separated.
It is clear how these provisions of the law are totally opposed to the demands of reason and morality. Yet at the same time it is equally clear how no efforts of the lawyers, however skilful or humane those efforts may be, can bring the present law into harmony with the demands of modern civilization. It is not the lawyers who are at fault; they have done their best, and, in England, it is entirely owing to the skilful and cautious way in which the judges have so far as possible pressed the law into harmony with modern needs, that our antiquated divorce laws have survived at all. It is the system which is wrong. That system is the illegitimate outgrowth of the Canon law which grew up around conceptions long since dead. It involves the placing of the person who imperils the theoretical indissolubility of the matrimonial bond in the position of a criminal, now that he can no longer be publicly condemned as a sinner. To aid and abet that criminal is itself an offence, and the aider and abettor of the criminal must, therefore, be inconsequently punished by the curious method of refraining from punishing the criminal. We do not openly assert that the defendant in a divorce case is a criminal; that would be to render the absurdity of it too obvious, and, moreover, would be hardly consistent with the permission to claim damages which is based on a different idea. We hover uncertainly between two conceptions of divorce, both of them bad, each inconsistent with the other, and neither of them capable of being pushed to its logical conclusions.
The result is that if a perfectly virtuous married couple comes forward to claim divorce, they are told that it is out of the question, for in such a case there must be a "defendant." They are to be punished for their virtue. If each commits adultery and they again come forward to claim divorce, they are told that it is still out of the question, for there must be a "plaintiff." Before they were punished for their virtue; now they are to be punished in exactly the same way for their lack of it. The couple must humor the law by adopting a course of action which may be utterly repugnant to both. If only the wife alone will commit adultery, if only the husband will commit adultery and also inflict some act of cruelty upon his wife, if the innocent party will descend to the degradation of employing detectives and hunting up witnesses, the law is at their feet and hastens to accord to both parties the permission to remarry. Provided, of course, that the parties have arranged this without "collusion." That is to say that our law, with its ecclesiastical traditions behind it, says to the wife: Be a sinner, or to the husband: Be a sinner and a criminal—then we will do all you wish. The law puts a premium on sin and on crime. In order to pile absurdity on absurdity it claims that this is done in the cause of "public morality." To those who accept this point of view it seems that the sweeping away of divorce laws would undermine the bases of morality. Yet there can be little doubt that the sooner such "morality" is undermined, and indeed utterly destroyed, the better it will be for true morality.
There is an influential movement in England for the reform of divorce, on the grounds that the present law is unjust, illogical, and immoral, represented by the Divorce Law Reform Union. Even the former president of the Divorce Court, Lord Gorell, declared from the bench in 1906 that the English law produces deplorable results, and is "full of inconsistencies, anomalies and inequalities, amounting almost to absurdities." The points in the law which have aroused most protest, as being most behind the law of other nations, are the great expense of divorce, the inequality of the sexes, the failure to grant divorces for desertion and in cases of hopeless insanity, and the failure of separation orders to enable the separated parties to marry again. Separation orders are granted by magistrates for cruelty, adultery, and desertion. This "separation" is really the direct descendant of the Canon law divorce a mensa et thoro, and the inability to marry which it involves is merely a survival of the Canon law tradition. At the present time magistrates—exercising their discretion, it is admitted, in a careful and prudent manner—issue some 7,000 separation orders annually, so that every year the population is increased by 14,000 individuals mostly in the age of sexual vigor, and some little more than children, who are forbidden by law to form legal marriages. They contribute powerfully to the great forward movement which, as was shown in the previous chapter, marks the morality of our age. But it is highly undesirable that free marriages should be formed, helplessly, by couples who have no choice in the matter, for it is unlikely that under such circumstances any high level of personal responsibility can be reached. The matter could be easily remedied by dropping altogether a Canon law tradition which no longer has any vitality or meaning, and giving to the magistrate's separation order the force of a decree of divorce.
New Zealand and the Australian colonies, led by Victoria in 1889, have passed divorce laws which, while more or less framed on the English model, represent a distinct advance. Thus in New Zealand the grounds for divorce are adultery on either side, wilful desertion, habitual drunkenness, and conviction to imprisonment for a term of years.
It is natural that an Englishman should feel acutely sensitive to this blot in the law of England and desire the speedy disappearance of a system so open to scathing sarcasm. It is natural that every humane person should grow impatient of the spectacle of so many blighted lives, of so much misery inflicted on innocent persons—and on persons who even when technically guilty are often the victims of unnatural circumstances—by the persistence of a mediæval system of ecclesiastical tyranny and inquisitorial insolence into an age when sexual relationships are becoming regarded as the sacred secret of the persons intimately concerned, and when more and more we rely on the responsibility of the individual in making and maintaining such relationships.
When, however, we refrain from concentrating our attention on particular countries and embrace the general movement of civilization in the matter of divorce during recent times, there cannot be the slightest doubt as to the direction of that movement. England was a pioneer in the movement half a century ago, and to-day every civilized country is moving in the same direction. France broke with the old ecclesiastical tradition of the indissolubility of matrimony in 1885 by a divorce law in some respects very reasonable. The wife may obtain a divorce on an equality with the husband (though she is liable to imprisonment for adultery), the co-respondent occupies a very subordinate position in adultery charges, and facility is offered for divorce on the ground of simple injures graves (excluding as far as possible mere incompatibility of temper), while the judge has the power, which he often successfully exerts, to effect a reconciliation in private or to grant a decree without public trial. The influence of France has doubtless been influential in moulding the divorce laws of the other Latin countries.
In Prussia an enlightened divorce law formerly prevailed by which it was possible for a couple to separate without scandal when it was clearly shown that they could not live together in agreement. But the German Code of 1900 introduced provisions as regards divorce which—while in some respects more liberal than those of the English law, especially by permitting divorce for desertion and insanity—are, on the whole, retrograde as compared with the earlier Prussian law and place the matter on a cruder and more brutal basis. For two years after the Code came into operations the number of divorces sank; after that the public and the courts adapted themselves to the new provisions (more especially one which allowed divorce for serious neglect of conjugal duties) and the number of divorces began to increase with great rapidity. "But," remarks Hirschfeld, "how painful it has now become to read divorce cases! One side abuses the other, makes accusations of the grossest character, employs detectives to obtain the necessary proofs of 'dishonorable and immoral conduct,' whereas, before, both parties realized that they had been deceived in each other, that they failed to suit each other, and that they could no longer live together. Thus we see that the narrowing of individual responsibility in sexual matters has not only had no practical effect, but leads to injurious results of a serious kind."[343] In England a similar state of things has prevailed ever since divorce was established, but it seems to have become too familiar to excite either pain or disgust. Yet, as Adner has pointed out,[344] it has moved in a direction contrary to the general tendency of civilization, not only by increasing the inquisitorial authority of public courts but by emphasizing merely external causes of divorce and abolishing the more subtle internal causes which constantly grow in importance with the refinement of civilization.
In Austria until recent years, Canon law ruled absolutely, and matrimony was indissoluble, as it still remains for the Catholic population. The results as regards matrimonial happiness were in the highest degree deplorable. Half a century ago Gross-Hoffinger investigated the marital happiness of 100 Viennese couples of all social classes, without choice of cases, and presented the results in detail. He found that 48 couples were positively unhappy, only 16 were undoubtedly happy, and even among these there was only one case in which happiness resulted from mutual faithfulness, happiness in the other cases being only attained by setting aside the question of fidelity.[345] This picture, it is to be hoped, no longer remains true. There is an influential Austrian Marriage Reform Association, publishing a journal called Die Fessel, or The Fetter. "One was chained to another," we are told. "In certain circumstances this must have been the worst and most torturing penalty of all. The most bizarre and repulsive couplings took place. There were, it is true, many affectionate companionships of the chain. But there were many more which inflicted an eternity of suffering upon one of the pair." This quotation, it must be added, has nothing to do with what the Canonists, borrowing the technical term for a prisoner's shackles, suggestively termed the vinculum matrimonii; it was written many years ago concerning the galleys of the old French convict system. It is, however, recalled to one's mind by the title which the Austrian Marriage Reform Association has given to its official organ.
Russia, where the marriage laws are arranged by the Holy Synod aided by jurists, stands almost alone among the great countries in the reasonable simplicity of its divorce provisions. Before 1907 divorce was very difficult to obtain in Russia, but in that year it became possible for a married couple to separate by mutual consent and after living apart for a year to become thereby entitled to a divorce enabling them to remarry. This provision is in accordance with the humane conception of the sexual relationship which has always tended to prevail in Russia, whither, it must be remembered, the stern and unnatural ideals of compulsory celibacy cherished by the Western Church never completely penetrated; the clergy of the Eastern Church are married, though the marriage must take place before they enter the priesthood, and they could not sympathize with the anti-sexual tone of the marriage regulations laid down by the celibate clergy of the west.
Switzerland, again, which has been regarded as the political laboratory of Europe, also stands apart in the liberality of its divorce legislation. A renewable divorce for two years may be obtained in Switzerland when there are "circumstances which seriously affect the maintenance of the conjugal tie." To the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, finally, belongs the honor of having firmly maintained throughout the great principle of divorce by mutual consent under legal conditions, as established by Napoleon in his Code of 1803. The smaller countries generally are in advance of the large in matters of divorce law. The Norwegian law is liberal. The new Roumanian Code permits divorce by mutual consent, provided both parents grant equal shares of their property to the children. The little principality of Monaco has recently introduced the reasonable provision of granting divorce for, among other causes, alcoholism, syphilis, and epilepsy, so protecting the future race.
Outside Europe the most instructive example of the tendency of divorce is undoubtedly furnished by the United States of America. The divorce laws of the States are mainly on a Puritanic basis, and they retain not only the Puritanic love of individual freedom but the Puritanic precisianism.[346] In some States, notably Iowa, the statute-makers have been constantly engaged in adopting, changing, abrogating and re-enacting the provisions of their divorce laws, and Howard has shown how much confusion and awkwardness arise by such perpetual legislative fiddling over small details.
This restless precisianism has somewhat disguised the generally broad and liberal tendency of marriage law in America, and has encouraged foreign criticism of American social institutions. As a matter of fact the prevalence of divorce in America is enormously exaggerated. The proportion of divorced persons in the population appears to be less than one per cent., and, contrary to a frequent assertion, it is by no means the rule for divorced persons to remarry immediately. Taking into account the special conditions of life in the United States the prevalence of divorce is small and its character by no means reveals a low grade morality. An impartial and competent critic of the American people, Professor Münsterberg, remarks that the real ground which mainly leads to divorce in the United States—not the mere legal pretexts made compulsory by the precisianism of the law—is the highly ethical objection to continuing externally in a marriage which has ceased to be spiritually congenial. "It is the women especially," he says, "and generally the very best women, who prefer to take the step, with all the hardships which it involves, to prolonging a marriage which is spiritually hypocritical and immoral."[347]
The people of the United States, above all others, cherish ideals of individualism; they are also the people among whom, above all others, there is the greatest amount of what Reibmayr calls "blood-chaos." Under such circumstances the difficulties of conjugal life are necessarily at a maximum, and marriage union is liable to subtle impediments which must forever elude the statute-book.[348] There can be little doubt that the practical sagacity of the American people will enable them sooner or later to recognize this fact, and that finally fulfilling the Puritanic drift of their divorce legislation—as foreshadowed in its outcome by Milton—they will agree to trust their own citizens with the responsibility of deciding so private a matter as their conjugal relationships, with, of course, authority in the courts to see that no injustice is committed. It is, indeed, surprising that the American people, usually intolerant of State interference, should in this matter so long have tolerated such interference in so private a matter.
The movement of divorce is not confined to Christendom; it is a mark of modern civilization. In Japan the proportion of divorces is higher than in any other country, not excluding the United States.[349] The most vigorous and progressive countries are those that insist most firmly on the purity of sexual unions. In the United States it was pointed out many years ago that divorce is most prevalent where the standard of education and morality is highest. It was the New England States, with strong Puritanic traditions of moral freedom, which took the lead in granting facility to divorce. The divorce movement is not, as some have foolishly supposed, a movement making for immorality.[350] Immorality is the inevitable accompaniment of indissoluble marriage; the emphasis on the sanctity of a merely formal union discourages the growth of moral responsibility as regards the hypothetically unholy unions which grow up beneath its shadow. To insist, on the other hand, by establishing facility of divorce, that sexual unions shall be real, is to work in the cause of morality. The lands in which divorce by mutual consent has prevailed longest are probably among the most, and not the least, moral of lands.
Surprise has been expressed that although divorce by mutual consent commended itself as an obviously just and reasonable measure two thousand years ago to the legally-minded Romans that solution has even yet been so rarely attained by modern states.[351] Wherever society is established on a solidly organized basis and the claims of reason and humanity receive due consideration—even when the general level of civilization is not in every respect high—there we find a tendency to divorce by mutual consent.
In Japan, according to the new Civil Code, much as in ancient Rome, marriage is effected by giving notice of the fact to the registrar in the presence of two witnesses, and with the consent (in the case of young couples) of the heads of their families. There may be a ceremony, but it is not demanded by the law. Divorce is effected in exactly the same way, by simply having the registration cancelled, provided both husband and wife are over twenty-five years of age. For younger couples unhappily married, and for cases in which mutual consent cannot be obtained, judicial divorce exists. This is granted for various specific causes, of which the most important is "grave insult, such as to render living together unbearable" (Ernest W. Clement, "The New Woman in Japan," American Journal Sociology, March, 1903). Such a system, like so much else achieved by Japanese organization, seems reasonable, guarded, and effective.
In the very different and far more ancient marriage system of China, divorce by mutual consent is equally well-established. Such divorce by mutual consent takes place for incompatibility of temperament, or when both husband and wife desire it. There are, however, various antiquated and peculiar provisions in the Chinese marriage laws, and divorce is compulsory for the wife's adultery or serious physical injuries inflicted by either party on the other. (The marriage laws of China are fully set forth by Paul d'Enjoy, La Revue, Sept. 1, 1905.)
Among the Eskimo (who, as readers of Nansen's fascinating books on their morals will know, are in some respects a highly socialized people) the sexes are absolutely equal, marriages are perfectly free, and separation is equally free. The result is that there are no uncongenial unions, and that no unpleasant word is heard between man and wife (Stefánsson, Harper's Magazine, Nov., 1908).
Among the ancient Welsh, women, both before and after marriage, enjoyed great freedom, far more than was afforded either by Christianity or the English Common law. "Practically either husband or wife could separate when either one or both chose" (Rhys and Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People, p. 214). It was so also in ancient Ireland. Women held a very high position, and the marriage tie was very free, so as to be practically, it would appear, dissoluble by mutual consent. So far as the Brehon laws show, says Ginnell (The Brehon Laws, p. 212), "the marriage relation was extremely loose, and divorce was as easy, and could be obtained on as slight ground, as is now the case in some of the States of the American Union. It appears to have been obtained more easily by the wife than by the husband. When obtained on her petition, she took away with her all the property she had brought her husband, all her husband had settled upon her on their marriage, and in addition so much of her husband's property as her industry appeared to have entitled her to."
Even in early French history we find that divorce by mutual consent was very common. It was sufficient to prepare in duplicate a formal document to this effect: "Since between N. and his wife there is discord instead of charity according to God, and that in consequence it is impossible for them to live together, it has pleased both to separate, and they have accordingly done so." Each of the parties was thus free either to retire into a cloister or to contract another union (E. de la Bedollière, Histoire des Mœurs des Français, vol. i, p. 317). Such a practice, however it might accord with the germinal principle of consent embodied in the Canon law, was far too opposed to the ecclesiastical doctrine of the sacramental indissolubility of matrimony to be permanently allowed, and it was completely crushed out.
The fact that we so rarely find divorce by mutual consent in Christendom until the beginning of the nineteenth century, that then it required a man of stupendous and revolutionary genius like Napoleon to reintroduce it, and that even he was unable to do so effectually, is clearly due to the immense victory which the ascetic spirit of Christianity, as firmly embodied in the Canon law, had gained over the souls and bodies of men. So subjugated were European traditions and institutions by this spirit that even the volcanic emotional uprising of the Reformation, as we have seen, could not shake it off. When Protestant States naturally resumed the control of secular affairs which had been absorbed by the Church, and rescued from ecclesiastical hands those things which belonged to the sphere of the individual conscience, it might have seemed that marriage and divorce would have been among the first concerns to be thus transferred. Yet, as we know, England was about as much enslaved to the spirit and even the letter of Canon law in the nineteenth as in the fourteenth century, and even to-day English law, though no longer supported by the feeling of the masses, clings to the same traditions.
There seems to be little doubt, however, that the modern movement for divorce must inevitably tend to reach the goal of separation by the will of both parties, or, under proper conditions and restrictions, by the will of one party. It now requires the will of two persons to form a marriage; law insists on that condition.[352] It is logical as well as just that law should take the next step involved by the historical evolution of marriage, and equally insist that it requires the will of two persons to maintain a marriage. This solution is, without doubt, the only way of deliverance from the crudities, the indecencies, the inextricable complexities which are introduced into law by the vain attempt to foresee in detail all the possibilities of conjugal disharmony which may arise under the conditions of modern civilization. It is, moreover, we may rest assured, the only solution which the growing modern sense of personal responsibility in sexual matters traced in the previous chapter—the responsibility of women as well as of men—will be content to accept.
The subtle and complex character of the sexual relationships in a high civilization and the unhappy results of their State regulation were well expressed by Wilhelm von Humboldt in his Ideen zu einen Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen, so long ago as 1792. "A union so closely allied with the very nature of the respective individuals must be attended with the most hurtful consequences when the State attempts to regulate it by law, or, through the force of its institutions, to make it repose on anything save simple inclination. When we remember, moreover, that the State can only contemplate the final results of such regulations on the race, we shall be still more ready to admit the justice of this conclusion. It may reasonably be argued that a solicitude for the race only conducts to the same results as the highest solicitude for the most beautiful development of the inner man. For, after careful observation, it has been found that the uninterrupted union of one man with one woman is most beneficial to the race, and it is likewise undeniable that no other union springs from true, natural, harmonious love. And further, it may be observed, that such love leads to the same results as those very relations which law and custom tend to establish. The radical error seems to be that the law commands; whereas such a relation cannot mould itself according to external arrangements, but depends wholly on inclination; and wherever coercion or guidance comes into collision with inclination, they divert it still farther from the proper path. Wherefore it appears to me that the State should not only loosen the bonds in this instance and leave ampler freedom to the citizen, but that it should entirely withdraw its active solicitude from the institution of marriage, and, both generally and in its particular modifications, should rather leave it wholly to the free choice of the individuals, and the various contracts they may enter into with respect to it. I should not be deterred from the adoption of this principle by the fear that all family relations might be disturbed, for, although such a fear might be justified by considerations of particular circumstances and localities, it could not fairly be entertained in an inquiry into the nature of men and States in general. For experience frequently convinces us that just where law has imposed no fetters, morality most surely binds; the idea of external coercion is one entirely foreign to an institution which, like marriage, reposes only on inclination and an inward sense of duty; and the results of such coercive institutions do not at all correspond to the intentions in which they originate."
A long succession of distinguished thinkers—moralists, sociologists, political reformers—have maintained the social advantages of divorce by mutual consent, or, under guarded circumstances, at the wish of one party. Mutual consent was the corner-stone of Milton's conception of marriage. Montesquieu said that true divorce must be the result of mutual consent and based on the impossibility of living together. Sénancour seems to agree with Montesquieu. Lord Morley (Diderot, vol. ii, Ch. I), echoing and approving the conclusions of Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1772), adds that the separation of husband and wife is "a transaction in itself perfectly natural and blameless, and often not only laudable, but a duty." Bloch (Sexual Life of Our Time, p. 240), with many other writers, emphasizes the truth of Shelley's saying, that the freedom of marriage is the guarantee of its durability. (That the facts of life point in the same direction has been shown in the previous chapter.) The learned Caspari (Die Soziale Frage über die Freiheit der Ehe), while disclaiming any prevision of the future, declares that if sexual relationships are to remain or to become moral, there must be an easier dissolution of marriage. Howard, at the conclusion of his exhaustive history of matrimonial institutions (vol. iii p. 220), though he himself believes that marriage is peculiarly in need of regulation by law, is yet constrained to admit that it is perfectly clear to the student of history that the modern divorce movement is "but a part of the mighty movement for social liberation which has been gaining in volume and strength since the Reformation." Similarly the cautious and judicial Westermarck concludes the chapter on marriage of his Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (vol. ii, p. 398) with the statement that "when both husband and wife desire to separate, it seems to many enlightened minds that the State has no right to prevent them from dissolving the marriage contract, provided the children are properly cared for; and that, for the children, also, it is better to have the supervision of one parent only than of two who cannot agree."
In France the leaders of the movement of social reform seem to be almost, or quite, unanimous in believing that the next step in regard to divorce is the establishment of divorce by mutual consent. This was, for instance, the result reached in a symposium to which thirty-one distinguished men and women contributed. All were in favor of divorce by mutual consent; the only exception was Madame Adam, who said she had reached a state of skepticism with regard to political and social forms, but admitted that for nearly half a century she had been a strong advocate of divorce. A large number of the contributors were in favor of divorce at the desire of one party only (La Revue, March 1, 1901). In other countries, also, there is a growing recognition that this solution of the question, with due precautions to avoid any abuses to which it might otherwise be liable, is the proper and inevitable solution.
As to the exact method by which divorce by mutual consent should be effected, opinions differ, and the matter is likely to be differently arranged in different countries. The Japanese plan seems simple and judicious (see ante, p. 461). Paul and Victor Margueritte (Quelques Idées, pp. 3 et seq.), while realizing that the conflict of feeling in the matter of personal associations involves decisions which are entirely outside the competence of legal tribunals, recognize that such tribunals are necessary in order to deal with the property of divorced persons, and also, in the last resort, with the question of the care of the children. They should not act in public. These writers propose that each party should choose a representative, and that these two should choose a third; and that this tribunal should privately investigate, and if they agreed should register the divorce, which should take place six or twelve months later, or three years later, if only desired by one of the parties. Dr. Shufeldt ("Psychopathia Sexualis and Divorce") proposes that a divorce-court judge should conduct, alone, the hearing of any cases of marital discord, the husband and wife appearing directly before him, without counsel, though with their witnesses, if necessary; should medical experts be required the judge alone would be empowered to call them.
When we realize that the long delay in the acceptance of so just and natural a basis of divorce is due to an artificial tension created by the pressure of the dead hand of Canon law—a tension confined exclusively to Christendom—we may also realize that with the final disappearance of that tension the just and natural order in this relationship will spring back the more swiftly because that relief has been so long delayed. "Nature abhors a vacuum nowhere more than in a marriage," Ellen Key remarks in the language of antiquated physical metaphor; the vacuum will somehow be filled, and if it cannot be filled in a natural and orderly manner it will be filled in an unnatural and disorderly manner. It is the business of society to see that no laws stand in the way of the establishment of natural order.
Reform upon a reasonable basis has been made difficult by the unfortunate retention of the idea of delinquency. With the traditions of the Canonists at the back of our heads we have somehow persuaded ourselves that there cannot be a divorce unless there is a delinquent, a real serious delinquent who, if he had his deserts, would be imprisoned and consigned to infamy. But in the marriage relationship, as in all other relationships, it is only in a very small number of cases that one party stands towards the other as a criminal, even a defendant. This is often obvious in the early stages of conjugal alienation. But it remains true in the end. The wife commits adultery and the husband as a matter of course assumes the position of plaintiff. But we do not inquire how it is that he has not so won her love that her adultery is out of the question; such inquiry might lead to the conclusion that the real defendant is the husband. And similarly when the husband is accused of brutal cruelty the law takes no heed to inquire whether in the infliction of less brutal but not less poignant wounds, the wife also should not be made defendant. There are a few cases, but only a few, in which the relationship of plaintiff and defendant is not a totally false and artificial relationship, an immoral legal fiction. In most cases, if the truth were fully known, husband and wife should come side by side to the divorce court and declare: "We are both in the wrong: we have not been able to fulfil our engagements to each other; we have erred in choosing each other." The long reports of the case in open court, the mutual recriminations, the detectives, the servant girls and other witnesses, the infamous inquisition into intimate secrets—all these things, which no necessity could ever justify, are altogether unnecessary.
It is said by some that if there were no impediments to divorce a man might be married in succession to half a dozen women. These simple-minded or ignorant persons do not seem to be aware that even when marriage is absolutely indissoluble a man can, and frequently does, carry on sexual relationships not merely successively, but, if he chooses, even simultaneously, with half a dozen women. There is, however, this important difference that, in the one case, the man is encouraged by the law to believe that he need only treat at most one of the six women with anything approaching to justice and humanity; in the other case the law insists that he shall fairly and openly fulfil his obligations towards all the six women. It is a very important difference, and there ought to be no question as to which state of things is moral and which immoral. It is no concern of the State to inquire into the number of persons with whom a man or a woman chooses to have sexual relationships; it is a private matter which may indeed affect their own finer spiritual development but which it is impertinent for the State to pry into. It is, however, the concern of the State, in its own collective interest and that of its members, to see that no injustice is done.
But what about the children? That is necessarily a very important question. The question of the arrangements made for the children in cases of divorce is always one to which the State must give its regulative attention, for it is only when there are children that the State has any real concern in the matter.
At one time it was even supposed by some that the existence of children was a serious argument against facility of divorce. A more reasonable view is now generally taken. It is, in the first place, recognized that a very large proportion of couples seeking divorce have no children. In England the proportion is about forty per cent.; in some other countries it is doubtless larger still. But even when there are children no one who realizes what the conditions are in families where the parents ought to be but are not divorced can have any doubt that usually those conditions are extremely bad for the children. The tension between the parents absorbs energy which should be devoted to the children. The spectacle of the grievances or quarrels of their parents is demoralizing for the children, and usually fatal to any respect towards them. At the best it is injuriously distressing to the children. One effective parent, there cannot be the slightest doubt, is far better for a child than two ineffective parents. There is a further point, often overlooked, for consideration here. Two people when living together at variance—one of them perhaps, it is not rarely the case, nervously abnormal or diseased—are not fitted to become parents, nor in the best condition for procreation. It is, therefore, not merely an act of justice to the individual, but a measure called for in the interests of the State, that new citizens should not be brought into the community through such defective channels.[353] From this point of view all the interests of the State are on the side of facility of divorce.
There is a final argument which is often brought forward against facility of divorce. Marriage, it is said, is for the protection of women; facilitate divorce and women are robbed of that protection. It is obvious that this argument has little application as against divorce by mutual consent. Certainly it is necessary that divorce should only be arranged under conditions which in each individual case have received the approval of the law as just. But it must always be remembered that the essential fact of marriage is not naturally, and should never artificially be made, an economic question. It is possible—that is a question which society will have to consider—that a woman should be paid for being a mother on the ground that she is rearing new citizens for the State. But neither the State nor her husband nor anyone else ought to pay her for exercising conjugal rights. The fact that such an argument can be brought forward shows how far we are from the sound biological attitude towards sexual relationships. Equally unsound is the notion that the virgin bride brings her husband at marriage an important capital which is consumed in the first act of intercourse and can never be recovered. That is a notion which has survived into civilization, but it belongs to barbarism and not to civilization. So far as it has any validity it lies within a sphere of erotic perversity which cannot be taken into consideration in an estimation of moral values. For most men, however, in any case, whether they realize it or not, the woman who has been initiated into the mysteries of love has a higher erotic value than the virgin, and there need be no anxiety on this ground concerning the wife who has lost her virginity. It is probably a significant fact that this anxiety for the protection of women by the limitation of divorce is chiefly brought forward by men and not by women themselves. A woman at marriage is deprived by society and the law of her own name. She has been deprived until recently of the right to her own earnings. She is deprived of the most intimate rights in her own person. She is deprived under some circumstances of her own child, against whom she may have committed no offence whatever. It is perhaps scarcely surprising that she is not greatly appreciative of the protection afforded her by the withholding of the right to divorce her husband. "Ah, no, no protection!" a brilliant French woman has written. "We have been protected long enough. The only protection to grant women is to cease protecting them."[354] As a matter of fact the divorce movement appears to develop, on the whole, with that development of woman's moral responsibility traced in the previous chapter, and where divorce is freest women occupy the highest position.
We cannot fail to realize as we grasp the nature and direction of the modern movement of divorce that the final tendency of that movement is to efface itself. Necessary as the Divorce Court has been as the inevitable corollary of an impossible ecclesiastical conception of marriage, no institution is now more hideous, more alien to the instinctive feelings generated by a fine civilization, and more opposed to the dignity of womanhood.[355] Its disappearance and its substitution by private arrangements, effected on their contractive sides, especially if there are children to provide for, under legal and if necessary judicial supervision, is, and always has been, the natural result of the attainment of a reasonably high stage of civilization. The Divorce Court has merely been a phase in the history of modern marriage, and a phase that has really been repugnant to all concerned in it. There is no need to view the project of its ultimate disappearance with anything but satisfaction. It was merely the outcome of an artificial conception of marriage. It is time to return to the consideration of that conception.
We have seen that when the Catholic development of the archaic conception of marriage as a sacrament, slowly elaborated and fossilized by the ingenuity of the Canonists, was at last nominally dethroned, though not destroyed, by the movement associated with the Reformation, it was replaced by the conception of marriage as a contract. This conception of marriage as a contract still enjoys a considerable amount of credit amongst us.
There must always be contractive elements, implicit or explicit, in a marriage; that was well recognized even by the Canonists. But when we treat marriage as all contract, and nothing but contract, we have to realize that we have set up a very peculiar form of contract, not voidable, like other contracts, by the agreement of the parties to it, but dissoluble as a sort of punishment of delinquency rather than by the voluntary annulment of a bond.[356] When the Protestant Reformers seized on the idea of marriage as a contract they were not influenced by any reasoned analysis of the special characteristics of a contract; they were merely anxious to secure a plausible ground, already admitted even by the Canonists to cover certain aspects of the matrimonial union, on which they could declare that marriage is a secular and not an ecclesiastical matter, a civil bond and not a sacramental process.[357]
Like so much else in the Protestant revolt, the strength of this attitude lay in the fact that it was a protest, based on its negative side on reasonable and natural grounds. But while Protestantism was right in its attempt—for it was only an attempt—to deny the authority of Canon law, that attempt was altogether unsatisfactory on the positive side. As a matter of fact marriage is not a true contract and no attempt has ever been made to convert it into a true contract.
Various writers have treated marriage as an actual contract or argued that it ought to be converted into a true contract. Mrs. Mona Caird, for instance ("The Morality of Marriage," Fortnightly Review, 1890), believes that when marriage becomes really a contract "a couple would draw up their agreement, or depute the task to their friends, as is now generally done as regards marriage settlements. They agree to live together on such and such terms, making certain stipulations within the limits of the code." The State, she holds, should, however, demand an interval of time between notice of divorce and the divorce itself, if still desired when that interval has passed. Similarly, in the United States Dr. Shufeldt ("Needed Revision of the Laws of Marriage and Divorce," Medico-Legal Journal, Dec., 1897) insists that marriage must be entirely put into the hands of the legal profession and "made a civil contract, explicit in detail, and defining terms of divorce, in the event that a dissolution of the contract is subsequently desired." He adds that medical certificates of freedom from hereditary and acquired disease should be required, and properly regulated probationary marriages also be instituted.
In France, a deputy of the Chamber was, in 1891, so convinced that marriage is a contract, like any other contract, that he declared that "to perform music at the celebration of a marriage is as ridiculous as it would be to send for a tenor to a notary's to celebrate a sale of timber." He was of quite different mind from Pepys, who, a couple of centuries earlier, had been equally indignant at the absence of music from a wedding, which, he said, made it like a coupling of dog and bitch.
A frequent demand of those who insist that marriage must be regarded as a contract is marriage contracted for a term of years. Marriages could be contracted for a term of five years or less in old Japan, and it is said that they were rarely or never dissolved at the end of the term. Goethe, in his Wahlverwandtschaften (Part I, Ch. X) incidentally introduced a proposal for marriages for a term of five years and attached much moral significance to the prolongation of the marriage beyond that term without external compulsion. (Bloch considers that Goethe had probably heard of the Japanese custom, Sexual Life of Our Time, p. 241.) Professor E. D. Cope ("The Marriage Problem," Open Court, Nov. 15 and 22, 1888), likewise, in order to remove matrimony from the domain of caprice and to permit full and fair trial, advocated "a system of civil marriage contracts which shall run for a definite time. These contracts should be of the same value and effect as the existing marriage contract. The time limits should be increased rapidly, so as to prevent women of mature years being deprived of support. The first contract ought not to run for less than five years, so as to give ample opportunity for acquaintance, and for the recovery from temporary disagreements." This first contract, Cope held, should be terminable at the wish of either party; the second contract, for ten or fifteen years, should only be terminable at the wish of both parties, and the third should be permanent and indissoluble. George Meredith, the distinguished novelist, also, more recently, threw out the suggestion that marriages should be contracted for a term of years.
It can scarcely be said that marriages for a term of years constitute a very satisfactory solution of the difficulties at present encountered. They would not commend themselves to young lovers, who believe that their love is eternal, nor, so long as the union proves satisfactory, is there any need to introduce the disturbing idea of a legal termination of the contract. On the other hand, if the union proves unhappy, it is not reasonable to insist on the continuation for ten or even five years of an empty form which corresponds to no real marriage union. Even if marriage is placed on the most prosaic contractive basis it is a mistake, and indeed an impossibility, to pre-ordain the length of its duration. The system of fixing the duration of marriage beforehand for a term of years involves exactly the same principle as the system of fixing it beforehand for life. It is open to the same objection that it is incompatible with any vital relationship. As the demand for vital reality and effectiveness in social relationships grows, this fact is increasingly felt. We see exactly the same change among us in regard to the system of inflicting fixed sentences of imprisonment on criminals. To send a man to prison for five years or for life, without any regard to the unknown problem of the vital reaction of imprisonment on the man—a reaction which will be different in every individual case—is slowly coming to be regarded as an absurdity.
If marriage were really placed on the basis of a contract, not only would that contract be voidable at the will of the two parties concerned, without any question of delinquency coming into the question, but those parties would at the outset themselves determine the conditions regulating the contract. But nothing could be more unlike our actual marriage. The two parties are bidden to accept each other as husband and wife; they are not invited to make a contract; they are not even told that, little as they may know it, they have in fact made a very complicated and elaborate contract that was framed on lines laid down, for a large part, thousands of years before they were born. Unless they have studied law they are totally ignorant, also, that this contract contains clauses which under some circumstances may be fatal to either of them. All that happens is that a young couple, perhaps little more than children, momentarily dazed by emotion, are hurried before the clergyman or the civil registrar of marriages, to bind themselves together for life, knowing nothing of the world and scarcely more of each other, knowing nothing also of the marriage laws, not even perhaps so much as that there are any marriage laws, never realizing that—as has been truly said—from the place they are entering beneath a garland of flowers there is, on this side of death, no exit except through the trapdoor of a sewer.[358]