Now if there is one thing which the evidence before the Commission puts beyond doubt it is that the law in relation to separation orders induces, invites, and causes immorality in the poor. Cranmer, you remember, knew all about that, and looked on separation without the right to remarry as an unclean thing. But since the sorrows of the poor in their marriage shipwrecks were so manifest, and the Divorce Court was closed to them, systems of magisterial separation orders, cheap permanent divorces, without the right to marry again, have become the order of the day. There are some six thousand of these decrees made annually. The evidence is overwhelming as to the evils that spring from these orders. As Mrs. Tennant reports, "I believe that separation orders, the general alternative offered to divorce, work badly in working-class houses, and on the whole make for an increase rather than a diminution of immorality. We have to consider housing conditions and economic circumstances which often do not make for clean or wholesome ways of life, and where the relief offered by separation is not only inadequate but positively mischievous." Put in plainer terms by the witnesses, a labouring man, if he has to find a home for his children, has to find a woman to keep house for him; a woman of the same class has to pay a rent, which necessitates the taking in of a lodger. Human nature being what it is, it seemed superfluous to appoint a Royal Commission of trusty and well-beloved ones to tell us what would happen. This is a system that the Archbishop of York thinks "probably fulfils its purpose fairly well." Of course, it all depends what its purpose may be. If it is its purpose to stand in the way of cheap divorce and the rights of the poor to have the same chance of rescue from a shipwrecked marriage that the rich possess, all is indeed well. But if the object of the law is to bring to those who are weary and in misery some hope of a new life and a new home where children can be born without shame and the parties can live in accordance with the wishes of themselves and their neighbours, then with all respect to the Primate of England, the law is probably fulfilling its purpose very damnably. It is only fair, of course, to remember that the Archbishop of York and his learned colleagues of the Minority Report never meet Fred and Jane and George and Anna in real life, and can know no more about such folk at first hand, and have as little chance of understanding their point of view, as I have of studying and comprehending the sociological limitations of the higher priesthood.