If you doubt this, ask any decent judge or
bishop. Do NOT ask somebody who does not know what a judge is, or
what a bishop is, or what the law is, or what religion is. In
other words, do not ask your newspaper. Journalists are too poorly
paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.
CONCLUSIONS
To sum up, we have to depend on the solution of the problem of
unemployment, probably on the principles laid down in the Minority
Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, to make the sexual
relations between men and women decent and honorable by making
women economically independent of men, and (in the younger son
section of the upper classes) men economically independent of
women. We also have to bring ourselves into line with the rest of
Protestant civilization by providing means for dissolving all
unhappy, improper, and inconvenient marriages. And, as it is our
cautious custom to lag behind the rest of the world to see how
their experiments in reform turn out before venturing ourselves,
and then take advantage of their experience to get ahead of them,
we should recognize that the ancient system of specifying grounds
for divorce, such as adultery, cruelty, drunkenness, felony,
insanity, vagrancy, neglect to provide for wife and children,
desertion, public defamation, violent temper, religious
heterodoxy, contagious disease, outrages, indignities, personal
abuse, "mental anguish," conduct rendering life burdensome and so
forth (all these are examples from some code actually in force at
present), is a mistake, because the only effect of compelling
people to plead and prove misconduct is that cases are
manufactured and clean linen purposely smirched and washed in
public, to the great distress and disgrace of innocent children
and relatives, whilst the grounds have at the same time to be made
so general that any sort of human conduct may be brought within
them by a little special pleading and a little mental reservation
on the part of witnesses examined on oath.
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