State and Church play in such "holy matrimony" a by no means handsome _role_. Whether the civil magistrate or clergyman, on whom may devolve the duty to celebrate the marriage, be convinced that the bridal couple before him has been brought together by the vilest of practices; whether it be manifest that, neither in point of age nor that of bodily or mental qualities, the two are compatible with each other; whether, for instance, the bride be twenty and the bridegroom seventy years old, or the reverse; whether the bride be young, handsome and joyful, and the bridegroom old, ridden with disease and crabbed;--whatever the case, it concerns not the representative of the State or the Church; it is not for them to look into that. The marriage bond is "blessed,"--as a rule, blessed with all the greater solemnity in proportion to the size of the fee for the "holy office." When, later, such a marriage proves a most unfortunate one--as foreseen by everybody, by the ill-starred victim, in most instances the woman, herself,--and either party decides to separate, then, State and Church,--who never first inquire whether real love and natural, moral impulses, or only naked, obscene egotism tie the knot--now raise the greatest difficulties. At present, moral repulsion is but rarely recognized a sufficient ground for separation; at present, only palpable proofs, proofs that always dishonor or lower one of the parties in public esteem, are, as a rule, demanded; separation is not otherwise granted. That the Roman Catholic Church does not allow divorces,--except by special dispensation of the Pope, which is hard to obtain, and, at best, only from board and bed--only renders all the worse the conditions, under which all Catholic countries are suffering. Germany has the prospect of receiving, in the not too far distant future, a civil code that shall embrace the whole Empire. It is, therefore, a side-light upon our times that, although even the superficial observer must reach the conclusion that at no previous period have unhappy marriages been so numerous as now--a natural consequence of our whole social development--the new draft for a civil code still renders divorce materially difficult. It is but a fresh instance of the old experience,--a social system, in the throes of dissolution, seeks to keep itself up by artificial means and compulsion, and to deceive itself upon its actual state. In declining Rome, marriage and births were sought to be promoted by premiums: in the German Empire, whose social order stands under a constellation similar with that of the decaying Empire of the Caesars, it is now sought to prevent the ever more frequent desire for the dissolution of marriage by means of forcible constraints.