Audubon Republican. [volume] (Audubon, Iowa) 1894-1925, 1895-03-21

49,
descriptive of many a homestead. II
needs no orthodox minister to prove to a
badly mated pair that there is hell
they are there now. Sometimes grand
and gracious woman will be thus incar-
cerated, and her life will be a crucifiX-
ion. as was the case with Mrs. Sigour-
ney, the great poetess and the great
soul. Sometimes a consecrated man
will be united to a fury, as was John
Wesley, or united to vixen, as was
John Milton. Sometimes, and general
ly, both parties are to blame, and
Thomas Carlyle was an intolerable
scold, and his wife smoked and swore;
and Froude. the historian, pulled aside
the curtain from the lifelong squabble
at Craigenputtock and Five, Cheyne
Row
Some say that for the alienation of
all these domestic disorders of which we
hear. easy divorce is a good prescrip-
ton. God sometimes authorizes divorce
as certainly as he authorizes marriage.
I have just as much regard for one law
fully divorced as l have for one lawfully
married. But you know and 1 know
that wholesale divorce is one of our
national scourges. / am not surprised
which have been abroad initiating
against the marriage relation.
For many years the platforms of the
country rang with talk about a free
love millennium. There were meetings
of this kind held in the Cooper institute,
New York; fremont temple, Boston,
and all over the land. Some of the
women who were most prominent in
hot lin
guished for great promiscuosity of affec-
ton. Popular themes for such occa-
Sions were the tyranny of man, the OPP
preston of the marriage relation, Wom-
ems rights and the affinities. Promi-
nent speakers were women with short
curls and short dress and very long
tongue, everlastingly at war with God
because they were created women;
while on the platform sat meek men
with soft accent and cOwed demeanOr
apOlogetic for masculinity, and holding
the parasols while the termagant ora
tors went on preaching the doctrine of
free love.
That campaign of about twenty years
set more devils into the marriage rela-
ton than will be exercised in the next
fifty. Men and women went home from
such meetings so permanently confused
as to who were their wives and hus-
bands that they never got out of their
perpleXity, and the criminal and civil
courts tried to disentangle the Had of
woes, and this one got alimony, and
that one got limited divorce, and this
mother kept the children on condition
that the father could sometimes come
and look at them, and these went into
poorhouSes. and those went into an in
sane asylum, and those went into dis
solute public life, and all went into de-
StructiOn. The mightieSt war ever made
against the marriage institution was
that free love campaign, sometimes
under one name and sometimes under
another.
Another influence that has warred
upon the marriage relation has been
polygamy in Utah. That was a Stereo-
typed caricature of the marriage rela-
ton, and has poisoned the whole land.
You might as well think that you can
have an arm in a state of modification
and yet the whole body not be sickened,
as to have those territories pOlygami-
zed, and yet the body of the nation not
feel the putrefaction. Hear it. good
men and women of America, that so
long ago as 1862 a law was passed by
congress forbidding polygamy in the
territories and in all the place where
they had jurisdiction. Twenty-four
years passed along and five administra-
lions before the first brick was knocked
from that fortrss of libertinism.
Every new president in the inaugural
tickled that monster with the straw of
condemnation, and every congress stul-
titled itself itself in proposing some plan
that would not work. Polygamy stood
more entrenched, and more brazen, and
more puissant, and more braggart, and
more Internal. James Buchanan, a
much abused man of his day. did more
for the eXtirpation of this villainy than
most of the subsequent administrations.
Mr.. Buchanan sent out an army, and al
though it was halted in it's work, still
he accomplished more than some of the
administrations when did nothing but
talk, talk, talk! At last but not until
it had poisoned generations, polygamy
has received its death-blow.
Polygamy in Utah warred against
the marriage relation throughout the
land. 1t was impossible to have such an
awful sewer of iniquity sending up it's
miasma, which was waited by the winds
north, south, east and west, without the
whole land being affected by it.
Another influence that has warred
against the marriage relation in this
country has been pustulolfs,t terature,
with it's millions of sheets every week
choked with stories of domestic wrongs,
and infidelities, and massacres, and out
RACES, until it is a wonder to me that
there are any decencies, or any common
sense left on the subject of marriage.
0ne-half of the news-stands of all our
cities reeking with the filth.
Now" say some, I'VE admit all these
evils, and the only way to clear them
out or correct them is by easy divorce"
Well, before we yield to that cry let US
find out how easy it is now.
have looked over the laws of all the
states, and / find that while in some
states it is easier than in others, in
every state 1t is easy The state of Illi- |
nois. through it's Legislature, recites a !
long list of proper causes for divorce, |
and then closes up by giving to the |
courts the right to make decree of di- !
yorce in any case where they deem it ex-
pedient After that you are not sur
prised at the announcement as" in one