are two words descriptive of many a homestead. It needs no orthodox minister to prove to a badly mated pair that there is a hell; they are there now. Sometimes a grand and gracious woman will be thus incarcerated, and her life will be a crucifixion, as was the case with Mrs. Sigourney, the great poetess and the great soul. Sometimes a consecrated man will be united to a fury, as was John Wesley, or united to a vixen, as was John Milton. Sometimes, and generally, both parties are to blame, and Thomas Carlyle is an intolerable scold, and his wife smokes and swears, and Froude, the historian, is mean enough, because of the shekels he gets for the manuscript,[3] to pull aside the curtain from the lifelong squabble at Craigenputtock and Five, Cheyne Row. Some say that for THE ALLEVIATION of all these domestic disorders of which we hear, easy divorce is a good prescription. God sometimes authorizes divorce as certainly as He authorizes marriage. I have just as much regard for one lawfully divorced as I have for one lawfully married. But you know and I know that wholesale divorce is one of OUR NATIONAL SCOURGES. I am not surprised at this when I think of the influences which have been abroad militating against the marriage relation. For many years the platforms of the country rang with talk about a free-love millennium. There were meetings of this kind held in the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, Cooper Institute, New York, Tremont Temple, Boston, and all over the land. Some of the women who were most prominent in that movement have since been distinguished for great promiscuosity of affection. Popular themes for such occasions were the tyranny of man, the oppression of the marriage relation, women's rights, and the affinities. Prominent speakers were women with short curls and short dress and very long tongue, everlastingly at war with God because they were created women; while on the platform sat meek men with soft accent and cowed demeanor, apologetic for masculinity, and holding the parasols while the termagant orators went on preaching the gospel of free love. That campaign of about twenty years set more devils in the marriage relation than will be exorcised in the next fifty. Men and women went home from such meetings so permanently confused as to who were their wives and husbands that they never got out of the perplexity, and the criminal and the civil courts tried to disentangle the Iliad of woes, and this one got alimony, and that one got a limited divorce, and this mother kept the children on condition that the father could sometimes come and look at them, and these went into poorhouses, and those went into an insane asylum, and those went into dissolute public life, and all went to destruction. The mightiest war ever made against the marriage institution was that free-love campaign, sometimes under one name and sometimes under another. Another influence that has warred upon the marriage relation has been POLYGAMY IN UTAH.