The claim for alimony which at present constitutes such a fecund source of injustice to men and corruption among women, implies the assumption that a woman is economically helpless, that she is a natural dependent whose support, having been undertaken by her husband, must be continued even after divorce, until she dies or finds another husband to support her. It does not take into account the woman’s rightful claim to any property that she may have helped her husband to accumulate, for the question whether or not she shall receive alimony is within the discretion of the court. On the other hand, the awarding of alimony may give a woman a claim to income from property possessed by her husband before marriage and therefore not rightfully to be enjoyed by her; it may, furthermore, give her an equally unjustifiable lien on his future earnings. Thus it allows women at once too little and too much. If the community is to continue to fix the economic obligations which marriage shall entail, it might be fairer to both sexes if those obligations were fixed as they have been in certain of our Western States. In those States, property acquired during marriage is regarded as common property, and in case of separation must be divided equally. Neither party may, during the marriage, dispose of such property without consent of the other; nor may either party dispose of more than half of it by will. On the other hand, either party has free disposal of property acquired before marriage, or inherited during marriage. In case one party dies intestate, the other shares equally with children in his or her half of the common property, and in other property. Thus the law raises woman above the status of a dependent and recognizes marriage as an equal partnership. Such laws, of course, do not fit all cases, for all marriages are by no means equal partnerships; but so long as the State insists upon maintaining a blanket-regulation of the marital relation, some such arrangement would seem to be more nearly just, both to men and women, than the laws now in force in most communities.