One subject which cannot be neglected in any attempt to foresee the conditions of the law in the next century is the delicate and difficult one of marriage laws: and on no subject are differences of opinion so numerous and so acute. All that seems to be generally agreed is that under the present system inconveniences and immoralities occur: and it is (of course) supposed to be a corollary that if the system were changed these inconveniences and immoralities would disappear. This is the usual method of considering social difficulties. Hardly anyone will consent to base plans for the future upon experience of the past. It is always presumed that new laws can reform abuses, without changes in the spirit of the age, which gives rise to the abuses. One class of thinkers, despairing of moral improvement, considers that, immorality being irremediable, the only thing to be done is to give it sanction; as it must exist, it must be made respectable and unscandalous. Another set of reformers would penalise immorality by forbidding the guilty party in a divorce suit to re-marry, just as there are people who would prevent the physically unfit from marrying at all. Both forget that the prohibition of legal unions is much more likely to lead to an increase of irregular connections than to produce any other effect. No doubt we could improve the physical standard of the legitimately born by the prohibition last digressively mentioned: but it would be at the expense of an increase in illegitimate births accompanied by the additional disadvantage of bodily weakness. Similarly, so far from the prohibition of re-marriage restraining the immorally disposed, it is much more likely that it would encourage them: the fact that a co-respondent could not be called upon to marry the woman divorced in consequence of her guilty association with him would hardly act generally as a deterrent; while, if he had been willing to face the probable consequences of publicity, expense and inconvenience attending a liaison with a woman under coverture, the co-respondent would not think it necessary to abandon his confederate, if he wished, and she were willing, to continue their connection after all the penalties had been suffered, merely because the law prevented a regular union. It is agreed by all jurists that the only justification for the greater severity with which matrimonial infidelity is visited on women as compared with men is the greater social degradation with which society visits women who have offended. To penalise their offence by prohibiting re-marriage would only perpetuate their degradation, and does in fact so perpetuate and increase it in countries where the condemned party in a divorce is forbidden the altar.