The judicial separation of to-day is one of the most unsatisfactory phases of matrimonial law and practice. Let us, for example, assume that _C_ is the husband of _D_. _C_ is a drunkard, a man of loose morals and disagreeable temperament. _D_ is the reverse in every possible respect, a woman of culture, youth and beauty. Her moral sense is exemplary and her conduct is always quite beyond reproach. After a most unpleasant legal experience, she obtains a judicial separation. Her position becomes isolated; she has a living husband, whose name she bears, she has attractions, but she can hold out no hope to a suitor, for she is still legally tied to the man from whom she is legally separated. Could a greater anomaly exist? It is unfair in the extreme. The most she can do, within the narrow limit of her outlook, is to resign herself to a physically unfair position, and await her husband’s death, which may not occur until her youth and beauty have vanished and she, too, confronts the grave. This is the practical outcome of many judicial separations, which ought in all justice to be done away with. Abolition, with an easier method of securing a divorce proper, is the need of the moment. With all due respect to the King’s Proctor, a somewhat thankless office, the interval--one may call it the probationary interval--which must elapse between the granting of a decree _nisi_ (or preliminary decree) and the granting of the decree absolute (or final decree) should be removed. In Scotland, there is only one decree necessary in a divorce suit. That one decree is final. The law in this country should be altered to resemble the Scotch law in this respect, at any rate. The _entr’acte_ which separates the decree _nisi_ from the decree absolute is generally a great hardship on a perfectly innocent party. It inflicts an un-English penalty which might well be deleted from the law of the land. Why should some drooping little petitioner of the feminine gender, already distraught with the aftermath of acute anxiety, be subjected to a fresh period of tension, prolonged for another six months? Somehow, one wonders why such a flagrant misconception of true justice should remain on the statute book. Of course, were it not for such anomalies, there would be no reason to look upon divorce law as a subtle and mysterious creation of the Devil, or as an involved and merciless contribution to penal literature, but, in its existing state, a good deal of harsh criticism is perfectly fair.