which now rests on the order of ex-Secretary John D. Long, that could be displaced in a day by a new order; and to provide a way in which citizens could enforce the laws in the immigrant stations and the Capitol, should the officers in charge fail to do so; and to keep liquors out of all government buildings not covered by special laws.

44

The hardest temperance fighting in 1903-7 was on the LittlefieldCarmack original-package" bill, to protect "no-license" towns and prohibition States against nullification by outside dealers who sell liquors to "speak-easies" under the protection of strange federal court interpretations of interstate commerce." This "States' rights" bill naturally had the nearly unanimous support of Democrats, but was defeated in 1903 and again in 1904, 5-6 by postponements demanded openly by the brewers, and secretly, no doubt, by the railroads also, for whose participation in the nullification of prohibition laws strong penalties had been put into the law. These opponents succeeded also in getting an amendment into the bill providing it should not apply to liquors imported for private use, an amendment wholly unnecessary, for no one was ever molested in such importation, but raising constitutional questions that led Congressman Lot Thomas, the champion of the bill in the House Committee, to say that unless the amendment could be killed, the bill itself should die lest it should make matters worse rather than better. The Waterloo field of the national temperance fight was opened in 1903 by the decision of the Supreme Court, in a case about lottery tickets, that the power of Congress over interstate commerce," is a power not alone to “regulate," but if the traffic is evil, a power to destroy. Therefore we have only to elect a Congress on the issue that it is as bad to sell liquors as lottery tickets in order to dam the liquor traffic on both sides of the State line, which the attorney of the United States Brewers' Association says is the only way to accomplish what is sought in the Littlefield-Carmack original-package" bill. The National Government can not forbid the States to sell liquors to their own citizens, without some new constitutional authority; but it can say, "No State shall corrupt or be corrupted by another State, and the long nullification by outsiders of laws made by States to restrain this drink evil shall forever cease.'

And that brings us to note the considerable progress made in the united attack of many nations upon the liquor and opium traffic among uncivilized races. This matter was taken up by the International Reform Bureau in 1900, when a treaty of seventeen nations to protect the natives of a large part of Africa against distilled liquors had long been languishing in our Senate pigeonholes. As a result of popular agitation that treaty was ratified by the Senate on December 14, 1900, as the closing act of the 19th century, and then, on January 5, 1901, to atone for having been in the rear in the movement for ten years, the Senate opened the 20th century by adopting a Reform Bureau resolution, to which President Roosevelt added his concurrence, inviting all nations to unite in a treaty to protect all uncivilized races against all intoxicants and opium. In token of good faith, Congress soon after passed the Reform Bureau's Gillett-Lodge bill, forbidding American traders to sell intoxicants and opium in Pacific islands having no civilized government (Protection of Native Races, see p. 1). These victories and the encouraging spread of local prohibition, especially in the South, should not make us forget the arousing fact that the consumption of liquors in

the United States has steadily increased since 1840, save in times of financial depression.

In many ways the most representative moral victory of the decade under review was the defeat of the opium monopoly in the Philippines. At midnight of May 31, 1903, the door-bell of the International Reform Bureau rang furiously and a cablegram, which cost the senders $150 in gold, was handed in-a message from the Manila Evangelical Union, embracing American missionaries of all denominations, signed for them all by Rev. Homer C. Stuntz, D. D., Superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Mission, which asked the Bureau to defeat an opium monopoly bill coming up in the Philippine government for final passage a few days later-it proved to be a fortnight-by arousing the "Sovereign People" to influence the President to overrule not only the Philippine government but also the War Department, which had approved the main features of the bill. It was hoped that President Roosevelt, whose instincts and familiarity with the history of the opium revenue industry in India and China, it was thought, would make him an instant enemy of any proposal for America to adopt such a policy, would veto the bill, as he had full power to do, without any appeal to public sentiment, but even so brave a President needs popular support at such a time, and so, with only half a week left before June 15, when the opium monopoly franchise was to be fastened on the Philippines for three years if the official slate was not broken, the Reform Bureau appealed to a few hundred leaders for a telegraphic vote against opium "revenue" and for opium prohibition. The result was a snow-storm of telegrams June 13 to 15. which became a composite photograph of public sentiment in the resulting cablegram sent to Manila by the War Department : "Hold opium bill, further investigations, many protests." The victory had showed, like a flash-light, the world-wide reputation and power of the International Reform Bureau. The private opium monopoly had been electrocuted, but opium prohibition was not enacted until 1905, to go into force at once for Filipinos, and for all in 1908. This opium prohibition, enacted by the United States Congress, had a powerful influence on the vote of the British Parliament, May 30, 1906, that the British government should bring the Indo-Chinese opium trade to "a speedy close." The documents of our Philippine battle were in the hands of the mover and seconder of the motion, as a potent weapon," said the Anti-opium Secretary, and when Mr. Morley rose as the India Secretary to proclaim China's emancipation, he too quoted our Philippine documents. The greatest unfinished battle that could speedily be won is the deliverance of all native races from the white man's rum and opium (Intoxicants and Opium in All Times and Lands, 9th edition, 1906). But even that will not end the long war of right and wrong, in which enlistment should be for life.

Did they finish the fight that day
When the Liberty Bell was rung?
Did they silence the noise of war
When Liberty's triumph was sung?
Was Freedom made Sovereign indeed
When the old bell pealed to the world
That the reign of Oppression was done
And the banner of Freedom unfurled?

A battle has waged since the world was new,
The battle is on! God calleth for you.

-ADDA MELVILLE SHAW,

HON. CARROLL D. WRIGHT ON DIVORCE.*

REV. WILBUR F. CRAFTS:

WASHINGTON, March 13, 1895.

MY DEAR SIR: In further reply to yours of the 8th inst., and especially to that part of it which relates to an address I made on the divorce question in 1891, I am very glad to offer you my thoughts upon the subject, and particularly upon those points wherein you find you cannot be in agreement with me.

The use of the words "Mosaic law" at the point suggested by you was a slip. It should not have been so. It seems to me, however, that the term "ecclesiastical view" was correct, because the ecclesiastical view of divorce means, if I understand it aright, the idea that no divorce should ever take place except for adultery. I have studied this question of marriage and divorce a great deal, and I am perfectly free to say that I cannot join those who believe that divorce should be limited to the one scriptural cause-adultery. One of the chief reasons for this opinion is that such a limitation reduces the whole matter to a low physical plane.

I want also to assure you that I am not in favor of lax divorce laws, but just where the line should be drawn is the great difficulty. To give you some idea of my argument, which you refer to as after the middle of my 1891 speech, I will say that I believe that industrial independence and rational divorce will ultimately reduce to the minimum the number of unholy marriages, the unions for convenience, for support, for physical reasons only perhaps, and will also reduce the number of murders and suicides growing out of abhorrent marital relations. These two things will also give stability to marriages wherein the psychical as well as the physical grounds are properly blended; in which affection, and not mercenary motives, is the predominant cause of marriage. I want to see marriages take place, as a rule, only when affection, and not simply law, is to bind the parties.

Herbert Spencer has very grandly expressed the true sentiment in this respect of the change from the soulless law status to that of affection. "In primitive phases," he says, "while permanent monogamy was developing, union in the name of the law-that is, originally, the act of purchase was accounted the essential part of the marriage, and union in the name of affection was not essential. In the present day, union in the name of the law is considered the most important, and union by affection as less important. A time will come when union by affection

* See discussion of Mr. Wright's views on pp. 66, 67.

will be considered the most important, and union in the name of the law the least important, and men will hold in reprobation those conjugal unions in which union by affection is dissolved." And Montaigne once wrote: "We have thought to make our marriage tie stronger by taking away all means of dissolving it; but the more we have tightened the constraint, so much the more have we relaxed and detracted from the bond of will and affection."

I believe in this line of thought, and that the purity of the family is more effectually secured by declaring that no sacredness exists when affection is destroyed than by holding men and women in hated bonds simply because a magic "Presto!" has been pronounced by a magistrate or by a minister.

Now, I am very well aware that one who wishes to agree with me in this position may not find himself able to do so, because he will think that the words of the Great Master stand in his way, and that the statements I have made are arguments against his command; and, furthermore, he may think that marriage is a sacrament which cannot be abrogated or annulled by human courts. I am willing to confront this position.

The Great Teacher had been preaching the new gospel along the shores of Galilee; he was followed by the multitudes from Galilee, from Decapolis, from Jerusalem, from Judea, and from beyond Jordan, and when in the mountain, and after he had given the world his wonderful sermon, the Pharisees, with their usual casuistry, undertook to draw from him some statement that would enable them to accuse him. To the interpretation of his sayings the skill of the grammarian, the lexicographer, and the expert exegetist has been brought to play a great part, yet with ever-dividing lines. His constant cry was that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, and he preached to inspire the people of his time and of the conditions that surrounded them. Let us concede for a moment that Matthew wrote down with exactness the words of Christ nearly thirty-two years after they were uttered, and that Mark remembered perfectly what his Great Teacher told him the Divine Master had said, and we have two crucial statements on which the whole ecclesiastical position rests: First, one which relates simply to remarriage under some condition; second, the command "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." I can find no statement limiting divorce to one cause only, or really prohibiting it for any cause; and the fact that great exegetists disagree on these points as to what Christ did mean, and that some of the wisest come to the conclusion I have reached, make me contend that I am in no way expressing views out of harmony with the teachings of the Great Master; but if I

am, before I vacate them, I must be convinced that Jesus was considering modern judicial divorce, and not simply the arbitrary putting away" of the wife, in accordance with the old custom, which had no law in it, and that under the great command, "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder," all unions are of God's joining.

My own conception of the work of Christ, as it related to the affairs of the state, is that he formulated a grand moral and religious constitution, a code of principles embodying old and new precepts which we call the basis of the Christian religion, but that he did not attempt to legislate on the details of conditions for all time. So while the Church (I use the word in the broadest sense) is bound to preach the loftiest ideals for the State in its legislative capacity, the State must grapple with the problems it finds, and the complex conditions which surround them. These conditions grow more and more complex as civilization advances in its grand march toward social perfection; and one of the most complicated and vexing questions the State has to deal with is that of marriage and divorce, for it must ever keep in view, in dealing with it, the purity and the sacredness of the family. In doing this may not the State consider that the dismemberment of the family by its internal warfare has already been accomplished through God's plans as well as that the original union was made by him? Has not the State this right when it is undertaking to secure the happiness of the greatest number? Has not God put asunder what in some cases man in a blasphemous way has attributed to God as joining? If this view is correct, divorce is but the legal recognition of an already disrupted family. Man, through his statutes, may recognize what God has already put asunder, even if he may not put asunder what God hath joined together. The powers that be are ordained of God, and it is right that we should render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's. This is the highest conception of the State, and is a declaration I emphatically accept. Christ constantly taught obedience to the powers that be. The powers that be, then, must regulate the affairs of the State. The family tie is broken, the integrity of the so-called sacrament violated, the putting asunder accomplished. Can there be any sacredness left? A new status of the parties has been created, not by law, but by the evil that exists in one or both of the parties. Law simply recognizes and defines the new status by a decree called "divorce," so that the legal conditions of all men may be known.

In a religious and ideal State there can be no crime; in the actual State there is much crime, and the legislator must meet the conditions of society as he finds them. In heaven there is to be no marrying and