Many look forward to a time when these everlasting political questions will cease to burn so fiercely, when the suppression of State or Church will no longer be a daily question, and more modest and practical measures of reform can be taken in hand. A committee of lawyers has elaborated an important scheme for the reform of our criminal procedure, long known to be seriously defective. Will there be an opportunity of bringing it before the Chambers? Even more interesting is the divorce question, which has found an able, persevering, and eloquent advocate in M. Naquet. Of all others, this reform is the most urgent. Those acquainted with family life in France know the fatal moral consequences arising from judicial separation, the only resource of ill-assorted couples. Not to speak of the flagrant injustice which allows the man to separate from his wife on account of offences she is obliged to tolerate in him, the two, though separated, remain jointly and severally liable. The woman is obliged, in a number of instances, such as the marriage of a child confided to her care, to obtain the husband's authorization, whilst she, on her part, can drag in the mire the name of her husband which she continues to bear, or pass off children upon him which are not his. Separation has all the drawbacks of divorce, besides others peculiar to it, which divorce remedies. M. Naquet has treated the question from the tribune, as also in a series of articles published in the _Voltaire_, wherein he cites a number of heartrending cases in which divorce would be the only possible remedy, and, finally, in the lectures he has been holding in all the large towns. His campaign has been crowned with success, and the law will, it is believed, be passed by the Chambers. No small credit is due to M. Naquet, for he had to contend with prejudices of several kinds--the religious prejudices of Catholicism, which does not admit the power of the civil law to cancel a sacrament of the Church; the political prejudices of Republican theorists, who affect to attach a more sacred and indelible character to the civil consecration of the magistrate than to the religious one of the priest; the prejudices of immoral and unprincipled men, who form a numerous class everywhere, who never having felt the restraints of moral law are not troubled by the misfortunes springing from unhappy marriages, but, on the contrary, are glad to take advantage of them; finally, with the prejudices of some serious-minded persons, who are afraid that in sanctioning divorce the Republic may appear to violate the respect due to marriage. The last aspect of the question has been ably supported by a deputy, M. Louis Legrand, in his interesting study, "Le Mariage;" but M. Naquet finds no difficulty in proving that marriage is more respected where divorce is possible than where judicial separation only can be obtained, nor in showing religious men that the Church has always recognised fourteen cases in which marriage