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207 Women’s Views of Divorce I am asked a simple question which requires a complicated answer. Do I justify the right of divorce? Assuredly. When? When the question is a duel between a wrong and a right; when not to give the right is to commit an undeniable wrong. I justify divorce as I do a surgical operation—then and thus only; when it is the last expedient,¹ the final hope, the desperate venture; when there is nothing else to be done to save the social life. A man and woman elect to tie themselves together for life, presumably because they cherish each other above all human beings. To say that the causes which practically invalidate this tie are infinite in variety is only to say that human nature exists. To insist that the causes which may legally separate the married should be limited in quantity is only to say that morality is a virtue or frailty a vice. We should go so far as to make this limitation the severest, the most strenuous, that the highest civilization will bear. I cannot believe, in this matter more than in others, in “going under,” as the phrase has it, to a compromise with ideal Right. But what is ideal Right? If a man knocks his wife down, he shatters the marriage-troth as much as if he brought an evil woman to her house. If a woman drinks away the moral nature of her unborn babe, she ceases to be a wife as surely as if she broke the Seventh Commandment.² “Infidelity” to the obligations of marriage is a term to which we give a too restricted use. I do not hesitate to say that personal abuse, or felony before the law, or desertion, or habitual drunkenness, or other equivalent (if there be equivalent) offences, may justify divorce as amply as the crime of adultery . But that these offences need to be identified with a legal conscience surpassing any thing yet brought to bear upon our statutes seems to me as much a matter of course as to say that the United States needs 208 Essays a navy.The power to unmarry—in a state of society like ours—should be made “a strait and narrow way.”³ We have built it so broadly that “thousands go in thereat.”4 It should be made unenviable, unpopular, unlikely, and the judgment of the people should hedge it about with thorns and barbed wire. It should be made as disgraceful as crime. It should be made as hard as death. The question whether a divorced person ought to marry again during the lifetime of the first partner is the last in, but it is the poser of the discussion. One gives an opinion on this point perfectly aware that life and time may change it; for one sees that experience modifies or creates opinion easily enough on any subject, but on none more thoroughly than on this. The personal equation affects our morality to an appalling extent; and saintly Stephen Blackpool, looking up out of the pit of death at the pure face of Rachel, in Dickens’s story,5 must have had his own views on divorce before which the comfortable judgment of a happy home ought to confess itself a blind and groping thing. But, so far as I feel qualified to form an opinion upon so tremendous a matter , I must believe that Mr. Gladstone, in this discussion, and Mr. E. J. Phelps,6 in that of another review, have come nearest to the right of the case when they would deny to the divorced under any circumstances the right of remarriage until death shall give it. Now, this old question is a threefold one, and ought to run like this: Shall we marry? Shall we unmarry? Shall we remarry? Clearly, it seems to me that the emphasis of the discussion has been put in the wrong place. We should slip it further along the line of interrogative. It is less important to inquire, Do they right to remarry? Were they wrong to unmarry? than to ask, Did they right to marry? I have spoken of the right of divorce as a surgical expedient. Carry on the figure of thought and we may learn a lesson. The best-instructed physicians know well that there exists to-day a subtle and powerful conflict in the professional world. On the one hand, the tendency of experiment turns terribly to surgery. Everything goes...

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