The enemies of divorce assert that it is the destroyer of the family. That is not so, for there are no more families to destroy. Frankly, honestly, where is the family of old, since the law of the majority has freed the child, since compulsory education has lessened the moral authority of parents, without perceptibly improving the mass of the people; since in the vast field of higher education boys and girls, through school life, become strangers to the authors of their being and are mainly indebted to the State for their training? If hypocrisy were not at the bottom of the whole matter, it would be quickly seen that nothing remains of the family as a sacred institution. Authority on the one side, submission on the other, are the exception; the sacrifices, too, which parents made in the past, to the point of forgetting their own well-being, have to-day no longer any reason for existing. Yes, divorce is useful, necessary, moral. But it may, it should, become more so, and undergo modification. Divorce by mutual consent must become the remedy for evils which dishonour the human soul; victims of unhappy marriages should be able to dissolve their union without the most intimate details of two lives--poisoned by misunderstanding, incompatibility of temper, excess, cruelty, and insult--being made a prey to public curiosity, the malice of barristers, and the opinions of judges. Those liberated from their matrimonial prison, and ripened by experience, must be allowed to marry the beloved one who has loved, consoled, and helped them through the battle of their days. Nine times out of ten, these new marriages would be happy, because the husband and wife would have had time to appreciate each other’s qualities, because they would have obeyed the law of love, escaped convention and not been guided, generally speaking, by interest, that chief and pernicious element in conflict between the sexes. Divorce, as at present established, does not afford enough solutions for the melancholy problems resulting from marriage. It is inadmissible, inhuman, even immoral, that one who has suffered patiently twenty years “for the children’s sake” should be condemned, because he or she has left the torture-chamber, to pass the remainder of life without the right to create a new home and consecrate by marriage the affection and devotion which have healed the old wounds, given back joy in living, and created for him or her obligations at once moral and social. The day when divorce shall become a law of justice, and no longer--as it sometimes is now--a tacit agreement covering wrongdoing; the day when divorce shall exist by the will of him or her who gives valid reasons for it, and also by mutual consent; the day, finally, when lover and beloved, under normal conditions, may marry, then true and rightful solutions will have been brought to impossible situations, and a noble work done for the individual and society at large. THE FAMILY