Litchfield enquirer., 1881-04-28
Divorce.

The great improvement. that the past five
 years has wrought sin Ghe4aws relating to
 married womens property is renfoving some
 of the objections to making our divorce laws
 nore stringent Formerly the wife's only
 refuge from the tyranny of the husband was in divorce. Now those married since, or who
 nave received property since, the passage Of
 those laws can have their own property in case If separation, so that the extreme remedy is 1 10 longer needed by them. Still, the wife separated from the husband except by his Eabandonment-has, even now. no right to her own children, unless of very tender years. The repeal of the ''omnibus' clause, and -the requirement. of three montts delay of df v0rce causes on the docket of the court to
 which they are brought, DO do6bt have great influence in lessening the proportion Of aiiv0rces, but that is not all. Two thirds of the petitions for divorce under the old law
 were on petition of the wife. This shows that escape from legal bondage rather than any
 lesire of remarriage is the cause of large proportion of the divorces. soea. <
 This important fact seems entirely to have escaped the notice vf the gentleman (Rev. Mr.. Dike, of Vermont) who delivered an address
 'n the subject of divorce reform at Hartford, on Wednesday evening of last week. The only generalization at which he arrives from mass of statistics is that the Yankee is d di vorcing animal-tha: the more well-to. do and intelligent we get, the more rapidly we swap wives! Not only IS this the case in tte Eastern States, but in the West. Wherever the Yankee prevails, there laxity of the mar. risge tie prevails also. Forinstance, in the coun- ties of the Western Reserve in Ohio. the divorce rate exceeds even that of Old Con. necticut; while in the Southern counties of that State, settled mainly from the South, di. vorces are comparatively infrequens. The Yankee city of Chicago-though not quite as bad as reported-is yet remarkable even on the exact record for her tiivorces, while we presume that in Egypt" the marriage tie has much more apparent permanence.
 Reformers such as Mir. Dike, who draw but one inference from frequency of divorce that of general cnrruption of morals take, as it seems to us entirely too narrow view of the case In the first place there are no other indications that New Englanders are be- coming licentious, immoral race, as that gentleman seems to believe. Indeed the fact above adverted to, that twice as many wives apply for divorce as husbands-a proportion accurately observed, year after year-is utterly inconsistent with the theory of growing immortality. Women are not, with few exceptions, the immoral part of our population, and we feel certain that imms- rality is not the occasion of their applications for divorce.
 We attribute the frequency of divorce rather to woman's growing senitiveness to the intolerable injustice of the common law marriage relation. Instead of submitting to that injustice as of old, she now rebels against it If our view is correct, the way te make marriage permanent is to make it just. Much has been done towards this in Connecticut; j; but all these ameliorations are prospective, not retrospective. Ten, or twenty, or thirty years hence, when the liberal laws of '77 and '78 have really changed the legal condition of married women (which they have but barely begun to do as ye) we shall hope to see the divorce rate diminished. and woman remain ing content in an equal marriage bond.