Most people are not equal to the consequences of their resolutions. On the contrary, like unseated riders they are dragged by their actions through degraded circumstances that they had not counted upon. Thus many a pair of lovers who have broken earlier ties, have been only a warning example—since their action was destructive, not enhancing to life. Ruin may be the climax of life; but inefficiency is always defeat; and of all the rashness of this life, the rash project of an exceptional lot is the saddest. Few people who have passed their youth have courage or strength for such new experiences as imply a real enhancement of life. The majority ought rather to employ their personality in the task of worthily bearing and making the best of their lot—and, in spite of all that is asserted to the contrary, that is also what most people do and will continue to do. Those who trust only in compulsion to restrain a man’s desire to desert his wife, forget to what a degree spiritual influences have even now facilitated divorce, in spite of the coercive law. One seldom finds in our day a high-minded husband or wife who insists on retaining the other against his or her will, except when it is clear to one partner that divorce, if conceded, would result in the certain ruin of the other. As a rule it is now only the narrow-minded or the low-minded who exercise the right of refusing divorce. If this right were abolished, this would not entail the abolition of the influences which even now keep married people together—although in most cases they might be free if they wished it. Those who thoughtlessly separated, when greater facilities are given, would be the same class of people who now, in coercive marriage, secretly deceive one another. To the serious, divorce will always be serious. Before a person of feeling and thought consciously hurts another who has loved or loves him, he himself has suffered terrible pain. Gratitude for a great devotion in a free connection has often proved more powerfully binding than the law could have been. Nay, to anyone tender of conscience the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones, since in the former case he has made a choice more decisive to his own and the other’s personality than if he had followed law and custom. And even when no feelings of affection exercise their retentive power, many people prefer to remain as wreckage on the same shore, rather than be washed away towards a new and uncertain fate. Human nature is credited with far too great simplicity and elasticity when it is taken for granted that one experiment in life would succeed another if divorce were free. In this case it is life itself, not the law, which fixes the insurmountable limits. To the deeper natures which have broken away from a life-connection, the pain of it has often been so great as permanently to deaden the colours of life.