In the first year of the war the number of cases heard in the divorce court rose from 289 to 520, which was the highest figure then on record. Last season the number had sprung up to 775, while on the present term's lists there are nearly 800 cases, showing the exceeding increase on the pre-war rate. A large percentage of the marriages which are dissolved by the court have been contracted since August, 1914. Petition after petition is filed praying for the dissolution of marriages which should never have been made. English law makes marriage far too easy. In addition to this alarming increase in divorce, a greater number of deeds of separation have been drawn up in the last two years than in any preceding twenty-five; cases of bigamy have also become very frequent, by women as well as by men. A stage has now been reached when the cry for reform must be listened to. Something has got to be done. The unhappiness and failure in many marriages looms before us a colossal, an unprecedented and menacing fact. Our eyes cannot any longer remain shut to the damning proofs which confront us from so many sides. IV The question as to how our ridiculous and immoral system of divorce--(I really must use those terms)--was ever permitted to come into use may be answered very briefly. The Church ordained that marriage is indissoluble, but, this being found impossible in practice, the State stepped in with a way of escape--a kind of emergency exit. But what a makeshift it was! how flagrantly dishonest, how indecent! Adultery must be committed, and, in the case of the woman claiming relief, cruelty or desertion must be added to the adultery. To escape the degradation of an unworthy partner another partner must first be sought, home-life wrecked by the worst kind of conduct, and marriage degraded by an act of infidelity. Now, this kind of thing is bad, and no possible shuffling can make it right; it is, indeed, so offensive to the feelings of most of us that it is very rarely, if ever, that the immoral and harmful way in which it acts is put into plain words. The divorce law with its materialistic refusal to accept any grounds for divorce except physical infidelity, physical cruelty or desertion, makes for a low view of marriage. Further, it directly encourages perjury, in fact makes lying essential to obtaining the relief of the law. The law refuses to legalize divorce by the consenting desire of both parties--calls such a wise arrangement collusion; yet it cannot prevent what everyone knows is done in the great majority of decently conducted divorce suits, where desertion and infidelity take place by arrangement. The law is very lenient to those who can pay for the best arrangements for circumventing the law's intentions, but even in spite of the recent concessions, is still hard on the ignorant poor and low class. The law is a snob as well as a pedantic, pompous ass.