15. The city rings, consisting of corrupt politicians, gamblers, harlots, and liquor sellers, who control nearly all our cities only because the churches do not unite against them the forces of righteousness. 81. We are not merely to medicate and dress an ever open sore of pauperism and insanity and idiocy and crime, but to cure it.-Professor C. R. Henderson, Dependents, Defectives, Delinquents, 270. LECTURE II. 1. It is claimed that the institution which Anglo-Saxons have in mind when they use the word home originated with the Puritans. Dr. Joseph Cook says: Mrs. Browning's Portuguese Sonnets and Robert Browning's Prospice are the noblest expressions of Christian ideals concerning marriage that literature, ancient or modern, contains." -Our Day, 1894, 349. 2. This exaggerated importance assigned to theft is usual in the legis lation of barbarians.-Professor C. R. Henderson, Dependents, Defectives, Delinquents, 166. At present the aim seems to be to protect property rather than person.-Ely, Socialism, etc., 336. The age of consent" for girls as to their property is eighteen (* majority”) in all States, but as to the person it is lower in most of the States.-See Purity note, in Appendix, Part Second. 3. Economics may be defined as the science of those social phenomena to which the wealth-getting and wealth-using activity of man gives rise. -Ely, Outlines of Economics, 82. 4. See chapter on "Oriental Idea of Father," in Trumbull's Studies in Oriental Life. 5. The immorality of mining and lumber and military camps is similarly explained; also some of the worst evils of immigration. Mr. Arnold White, in Charities Review, 3: 77, says: Since the home is the unit of the nation, celibate immigration should be discouraged by adequate restrictive means. . . Any nationality should be carefully watched when the female immigrants fall below thirty-five per cent. of the whole. On this basis Russia, Italy, and Hungary furnish unsatisfactory records." On this basis Mr. White justifies Chinese exclusion, and so would I if the exclusion was on this basis and applied with American impartiality to Europe and Asia. 6. He who does not study the humor of the day misses many a serious and important truth: for instance, in the case of the philanthropic lady who asked a frowzy child in the street, Where is your home? "Haint got no home." "Poor thing, what do you do?" "I board." The answer gave no occasion for canceling her pity. 7. National Divorce Reform League Leaflet, No. II, p. 4. 8. See my article in the New Englander, September, 1882, on “Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child in Unchristian Lands.' 9. Religions were necessarily studied at the Parliament on the basis said to have been adopted by an indulgent mother, who ordered that her child should be taught history "with all the painful parts left out." I am sorry that it is not consistent with my duty to discuss my present subject on that plan. 10. The Hindu who will not allow a doctor to see his wife's tongue and feel her pulse except by cutting holes through the curtain behind which she is hidden, will send that wife gladly to the libidinous priest whenever he so requests, counting such adultery as divine service by which she is made holy. Mrs. Mary Clement Leavitt, W. C. T. U. Round the World Missionary, so stated in the author's hearing at Monona Lake Assembly. on missionary testimony. As to his daughters, this Hindu will strangle one at birth, train a second for marriage, and consecrate a third to the enrichment of his religion as a temple prostitute, thinking the last act even more meritorious than the marriage, and the first quite as much within his "liberty." The following incident is truth if not fact also, as it well may be. It is reported that a missionary visiting the grounds of a Chinese nobleman, and passing among the venerable trees, shady paths, and beside the beautiful lake, with its bridges, islands, and summer-houses, saw on a large sign, in Chinese characters: "Please don't drown girls here." Rev. Robert A. Hume of India, in the Missionary Herald of July, 1894, quotes the following description of the greatest day of one of the greatest Hindu feasts held at the junction of the Ganges and Jumna-the Sadhus referred to being so-called "saints," who live by beggary, considered so "spiritual" by some Christians at a distance as not to need Christ: "Monday was the great day, the special feature being the procession of Sadhus to bathe. Never shall I forget the sight. It was estimated that a million of people were present. How can we speak of the disgusting procession? At the head of the procession, about six elephants, then a brass band, then marching two by two and hand in hand, great numbers of these Sadhus, perfectly naked, their bodies and faces smeared with ashes, their voices raised in discordant shouts. They looked more like demons than men. After them were some palanquins, next more Sadhus, who had more or less clothing on, and in the rear the female fakirs."-There are in India twenty-one million widows, half of whom were never wives, many of whom are mere children, who are treated as if guilty of the death of their husbands. So says Joseph Cook in his 194th Monday Lecture. The foregoing facts represent all unchristian lands, ancient and modern, in their treatment of woman. The only religion that does not, by its impurity, assail the divine nobility of the family is Christianity. Great as are the evils of our Christian land in matters pertaining to the family, let us congratulate ourselves that they are at least branded as evils, not treated as legitimate business or meritorious worship. II. As the Mormons have been conquered but not convinced, Christian education will need to be used with redoubled energy, that the very belief in polygamy may be dislodged from the rising generation, as otherwise the Mormon vote is likely to nullify if not repeal all anti-polygamy legislation. Send to Reform Bureau, Washington, D. C., for latest facts 12. Fifth Report of the United States Commissioner of Labor on Laws of Marriage and Divorce in the United States and Europe, to be had free on application to National Bureau of Labor, Washington, D. C. (The documents of the National Divorce Reform League, Dr. S. W. Dike, Auburndale, Secretary, some of them valuable commentaries on the above report, will also be needed by all students of divorce.) The most important figures are as follows: Divorces in 1867, 9937; in 1886, 25,535, an increase of 157 per cent,, while opulation increased about 60 per cent. Between the census years, 1870-1880, divorces increased 79 per cent., population 30 per cent. In 1870 there was I divorce out of every 664 existing married couples; in 1889, 1 out of every 481. The total divorces for the 20 years, 328,716. Of these 65 per cent. were sought by wives. Eighty per cent. of the marriages were performed in the same State that granted divorce, showing the divorce colonies less prominent factors than supposed. "In over 60 per cent. of the cases there was a notable lack of the influence of children." Twenty-five thousand three hundred and seventy-one couples had lived together 21 years or more, and the average for all couples was 9 years. In the large cities the divorce rate is about 50 per cent. higher than in the remainder of the States. So far as records show about 67 per cent. of divorces asked for were granted. In South Dakota divorces were granted on 90 days' residence. New York is the only State adhering to the one scriptural ground of divorce, but legal separation, without permission to marry again, is granted for other causes.-See Tribune Almanac of 1895 for statistics of conjugal conditions, June 1, 1890, as to ages of marriage, etc. D. Convers gives further figures based on the same report. He says In 1889, one-half of our population were under laws which required for marriage only the interchange of consent-which in Europe is the case only in Scotland.-Marriage and Divorce, 20. This book abounds in instances where the courts, in protection of the woman, assumed consent from cohabitation. This loose marriage law, while open to abuses, also prevents abuses by making loose conduct dangerous. Convers says further (pp. 131, 134, 135, 172): Even when the consent of parents is necessary to the legality of a marriage, it is usually held by the courts that it is not necessary to its validity. The wedded pair may be fined in such case, but are not separated. . . A married New Yorker, divorced and forbidden to remarry, crosses the Hudson to Jersey City, there marries, returning at once; and the court held that marriage to be good in New York... New York and Tennessee allow the marriage of uncle and niece and of nephew and aunt. . . Whatever be the reason to explain it, the fact is clear that divorce reform depends more on women than on men. The laws are drawn to favor them; they chiefly use the courts. It is emphatically a woman's question.-Convers' Marriage and Divorce, 172. The same writer shows that if divorce had been restricted to adultery and desertion, it would have prevented more than 134,000 divorces in 20 years preceding 1889. 13. Dr. S. W. Dike in a document on Divorce Legislation (Series of 1889, No. 3) thus sums up European laws of marriage and divorce, which should be studied for amendments to our inferior laws: "Generally it may be said that marriage in Europe is now strictly a civil act, though place is made for a religious service, where desired. The improved laws of European countries are generally parts of a carefully prepared scientific whole, some of the later systems, as in Germany and Switzerland, being the work of eminent law professors. The . legal age of marriage; degrees of consanguineous or other relationship; consent of parents (a much more real thing in Europe than here); rules for notice of intention; provision for verifying the facts alleged, often including certification both of the fact and means of the dissolution of a previous marriage, whether by death or divorce; strict requirements for publication; restrictions as to locality within which the marriage must occur; generally, provisions that ten months or a year, except by special dispensation, must intervene between the dissolution of one marriage and the contraction of another; express provisions that a person divorced for adultery cannot marry a paramour; the most careful registration (and report to the statistical bureaus) of marriages as well as divorces-these are almost invariable features of European marriage laws. .. Divorce in Europe is very unlike divorce in the United States. There is a but a single divorce court for England and Wales, and in few (if any) European countries do the courts having jurisdiction of divorce correspond to the ordinary county courts of this country. The causes for which divorce may be granted in some countries in Europe are scarcely fewer than those in the United States, even extending to divorce by mutual consent. But the administration is far more carefully controlled than here. Belgium and some other parts of Europe are still governed by the Code Napoleon. But divorce by mutual consent is admissible only where the husband is at least twenty-five years old and the wife twenty-one, and is not allowed after twenty years of marriage life, or when the wife has reached her forty-fifth year. Attempts at reconciliation before divorce is decreed must be made in Holland and some other countries, though of late Prussia seems to have dropped the practice. A special feature of some legislations is judicial separation for a period of years (in Holland for five years), capable of conversion into absolute divorce at the end of the period. There were from six to fourteen of these separations annually in Holland among a number of divorces ranging from two hundred to four hundred. An active public opponent in the interests of the state is a common thing in Europe." 14. Send to him for his speech in advocacy of a national marriage and divorce law. 15. National Divorce Reform League Report for 1888, p. 36. 16. Delivered before National Unitarian Conference; published in full in The Christian Register, Boston, October 8, 1891; also in Lend a Hand, 1891: 283 ff. 17. Convers' Marriage and Divorce, gives the Roman Catholic argument against absolute divorce (legal separation is allowed) for any cause, and a valuable collection of facts, especially legal decisions, on the general subject. 18. Correspondence with Mr. Wright as to his address drew from him the following caveat: "When you review the speech on divorce do not make the mistake which some critics have made. I was limited to a certain time for delivery, and practically closed the address in the middle: that is, I did not have the opportunity to show in what respect I believed that divorce temporarily would lead permanently to the doing away of divorce, nor did I have an opportunity to take up the ecclesiastical view of divorce, all of which are essential to a proper understanding of the divorce question. My own views on the subject I find are in accord with those of Judge Sibley, Judge Bennett, and a long line of excellent thinkers back to and including Luther; nor can I convince myself that these views are not in accord with the principles which Christ taught. It seems to me, on studying the question very broadly, that he was referring in what he said on divorce more largely to remarriage, a subject which I do not discuss. 44 Thanking you always for your kindness, I am, sincerely yours, This led to a request for the unpublished part of the argument, which is given in full in the Appendix-an argument that would be conclusive against limiting legal separation to one cause, but the author still thinks that absolute divorce is by Christ, and, for the general good, should be limited to " the one Scriptural cause.' 19. Matt. xix : 9. " 20. Leaflet of National Divorce Reform League, "Twelve Rea sons," etc. 21. At the meeting of the National Woman's Council in 1895 the Committee on Divorce declared against any further legislation on divorce, State or national, until women have a voice in making laws-a recommendation favorable neither to woman suffrage nor to divorce. 22. South Dakota in 1895 was generally reported by the careless press as having returned to its scandalous ninety days' bait for divorce colonies, and did almost pass a bill to that effect, for “ business reasons," as one of its Congressional delegation informed me, to make up for losses by absconding State Treasurer and hard times. If a State is to traffic in the relations of man and woman, it might as well do it on the Omaha license plan as on the Oklahoma divorce plan. North Dakota is still in the ninety days' ditch and should be shamed out of it, as South Dakota was, by the protests of the friends of the family everywhere. As to Oklahoma's Territorial law, Congress should be asked to veto it. 23. That making divorces difficult decreases them seems to be the meaning of statistics from Canada, where divorces are obtained only from the Dominion Parliament through a committee of its Senate, which grants only 2 or 3 per year in a population of 5,000,000. Contrast the foregoing facts with increase of divorces through relaxed legislation in Australia. See Christianity Practically Applied, 2: 58, 71. 24. In 1870 there were 1,836,288 female wage earners, nearly one-half "domestics." Of the 2,647,157 in 1880 two-thirds were in other occupations. In an address at Chatauqua in 1894, Hon. Carroll D. Wright gave the following statistics from Massachusetts as representative: Female labor constitutes nearly 12 per cent. of the whole; professional services, 46.26 per cent.; personal service, 40.66 per cent. In trade women are 11.09 per cent of the whole; in transportation only .29 per cent.; in agriculture, .52 per cent.; in the fisheries 9 per cent.; while in manufactures female labor is 28.58 per cent. of the whole." A prize article in Once a Week, vol. viii. No. 19, gives a very full enumeration of the very numerous occupations which have been undertaken by women. The U. S. census bulletin of occupations, issued May 18, 1895, shows that during the census decade 1880-1890, while the increase in the number of men and boys engaged in gainful occupations was 27.64 per cent., the increase in the number of women and girls was 47.88 per cent., but of the total number of women and girls over 10 years of age, only 16.98 per cent. are so engaged, while the percentage of men and boys is 77.28. The total number of breadwinners on June 30, 1890, was 22,735,661, of whom 18,820,950 were men and boys, while only 3,914,711 were women and girls. In Great Britain, in 1891 the percentage of women and girls above 10 years of age so engaged was 34.42 per cent., but had increased only from 34.05 in 1881 (The Voice, July 25, 1895), showing that the maximum seems there to have been reached. It may not be irrelevant to add that in the decade 1880-1890 the increase of our population was only 24 per cent., the lowest except for the war decade. 1860-1870, when it was 22. Figures are as follows for decades ending |