=The Prevalence of Divorce.=--Many urge reactionary attitudes toward present family ideals and practice because of the divorce problem. The omission of this from the list of causes for the modern instability of the family and for its too frequent lack of success may have been already noted and condemned by the reader of these pages. The fact of divorces, however, whether they be many or few, is to the writer a symptom, not a cause, the legal expression of a social disease, not the disease itself. Bad diagnosis, or inadequate treatment on the basis of a symptom, may increase the disease; and the facts concerning divorce are of so serious a nature that a separate chapter has been assigned to them under the heading: The Broken Family. The prevalence of divorce, however, it must here be said, demonstrably proves two things--one that men and women now feel themselves at moral and social liberty to seek divorce when longer living together seems to them intolerable, and that women are using their new freedom and economic independence to make marriage conditions more to their liking. They are setting a standard respecting desirable husbands, not always wisely, often selfishly, but in the long run and large way to ends of greater equality of demand in the marriage relation. The tendency on the whole is toward a higher conception of what marriage should be and what it should do for both parties in the bond. The statistics of illegitimacy, of commercialized prostitution, of venereal disease, of infant mortality, of early death or life-long invalidism of wives and mothers, of marital unhappiness and parental neglect which are found by honest investigation in states and nations in which no divorce is allowed do not lead to the belief that legal permanence of the marriage bond secures socially helpful family life. On the contrary, such facts already show that divorce in the civilization we have inherited comes as a result of bad conditions which worked infinite harm before divorces could be obtained. =Old Institutions Need New Sanctions.=--We must now ask of any laws concerning any institution not what did ancient "folk-ways" ordain but what do modern conditions require? No form of human association, however old and whatever its contribution to the social inheritance, but is on trial to-day before all free minds. That trial must be openly conducted. No "secret diplomacy" to reinstate old ideals or laws against the common belief; no "boring from within" to propagate new schemes the object of which is to gratify personal wish without regard to public good; but "open covenants" with the future "openly arrived at" in an ethically consecrated present. What shall be our guide in such a free and frank consideration of the present and the future of the family?