In setting out to look calmly at the subject of divorce, no good can be arrived at by studying isolated cases, inasmuch as surely there can be no divided opinion upon the fact of the cruelty of some of them, and the certainty of their betterment by divorce. The one and only aim to keep in view is what will be best for the whole people, and no other aspect should ever influence the true citizen in making up his mind upon so vital a question. Thus surely we ought each one of us to ask himself or herself to look ahead, and try to imagine what would be the result to our nation of relaxing the severity of the present divorce law--or of increasing it. Of the effects of its present administration we can judge, so it ought to be no impossible task to work from that backwards or forwards. But to look at any subject dispassionately, without the prejudice of religion or personal feeling, is one of the hardest things to accomplish. These two forces always make people take views as unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, regardless of totally altered conditions and requirements of mankind. I hold a brief for neither side, and in this paper I only want to suggest some points of view so as to help, perhaps, some others to look at the matter with justice, as I have tried to look at it myself. It would seem to me that divorce as a means of ridding oneself of one partner merely to be happier with another must surely always be wrong, because it must entail the degradation of conscious personal motive, in the knowledge that one had taken advantage of a law to gain an end, and to help one to break a vow solely for one's own gratification. The enormous responsibility of so taking fate into their own hands would frighten most people, if they gave themselves time to think--but they do not. Nine-tenths of them have no compunction in breaking vows, because they do not realise that by making them they have connected themselves with currents and assumed responsibilities the consequences of which to themselves they cannot possibly eventually avoid, no matter how they may try temporarily to evade them.