Daily inter mountain. [volume] (Butte, Mont.) 1881-1901, 1900-04-07

GOVERNMENTAL DIVORCE
Cincinnati Enquirer: The liberal di.
Vorce laws of the last hundred years
have reduced the frequency of wife
murder about one-half and that of hus-
band mrude at least four-flfths. There
was a time when Bathseba's only hope
OF deliverance rested upon the chance
OF burying her domestic tyrant, and al
a consequence the Davids of that ar-s
were remarkably subject to bowel COM
plants.
In Italy government detectives dis
covered a husband poisoning associa-
ton. with a membership rivaling that
of our Women's Rights league. A Sicil-
ian arsenic extract, known as aqua to.
ana had become as popular as settler
water. and III matrimonial market was
overstocked with young widows.
The sons of David could dispense with
divorce, but when ''morganatic'' mar
riages went out of fashion ex-polyga-
mists resorted to Islander, Punishment
and Bluebeard methods.
the total separation OF church ar
state In America. and their partial
separation In all European countries,
except Russia, has prevented still great
CI HtlcNA1lCls IL HAS OUldl1lCu dulOS-ua
fe, it has precluded the possibility OF
-missfonary man-hunts n crusades.
THE PLAN OF THEODOSIUS.
We're strikingly illustrated by the expe-
riment of TheOdosius the Great. The in
terests of the nations i%nhabiting the
eastern and western parts. of the Roman
world-empire had become hopelessly ir-
reconcilable, and by trying to keep all
the Pn0nprOrS W,n1116 have lost all Yhnra
was a tradition that the twelve vultures
seen in the prophetic trance of Romulus
presaged twelve centuries of Rome's
fortune, n the beginning of the thir-
teenth hundred was disastrous enough
to verify the omen; but the eastern half
of the empire survived the storm, thanks
to the remoteness of its new capital. A
full millennium was addeu it's lease of
life, and only a few years before the dis
covery of America. a Turkish conuueror
succeeded in completing the work begun
BY the adventurous Goths
The same" Turks ~Overpowered the Sla-
vonic tribes of the Lower Danube. but
released them in time to prevent the
attacked by the mink it had tried to kid
mar. did not come nearer destruction
than the Turkish empire under the sue
cessors Of Solyman the Magnificent. who
attempted to crush the revolts Of those
border provinces. Two and one-half
millions Of Turkish soldiers were slain
in the mountain passes and fortress
trenches of the Danubian principalities.
Assimilation bees me more and more I'M
possible, and another century of pillage
campaigns would have turned. Eastern
Europe into a desert resembling the rock
wastes of Turkestan.
SEPARATION OF BELGIUM AND
HOLLAND.
Nor can it be doubted that the divorce
OF Holland and Belgium forestalled a Sc
ries of civil wars. The two horses
might Craze peacefully, side by side. bur
could never be made to pull in one team.
The Belgian at heart is q Frenchman.
sprightly, Chatty, fun-loving, insisting
on the privilege Of Sunday afternoon
amusements and hating asceticism as his
forefathers hated the gloomy tyranny or
Philip II. His Dutch neighbor, on the
contrary, has all the instincts Of a
Scotch kirk saint, cautious. taciturn.
close-fisted, equally fond Of spiritual
and spirituous stimulants C"Haarlem
schnapps and holy ~groans'),. and vieing
with his fellow penitents to make the
first day Of the week as dreary as possl-
BILE. Bylaws that awakened the halle
lujahs of The Hague We're received at
Brussels with a storm of cat-caIls, and
at last the opposing parties agreed to
set up separate legislatures. There has
been peace on the treckschuyt path ever
since and the cities. OF both sides of the
division canal have prospered as they
could never hav hoped to prosper on the
plan of cooperative housekeeping.
1t was, indeed, a mere political acct
dent tina united the French-speaking
and D~utch-speaking populations of the
Lower Rhine, the hill jewellers of the
Ardennes with the bogtrotters of the
Zuyder Sea. and a similar accident con-
the eastern and western hall
of the country now known as the state
of Kentucky.
Up to the end of the eighteenth CEN
fury the "land-grant of Virginia" ex-
tended from the Atlantic to the banks OF
the Mississippi, and comprised three
wholly dissimilar regions: l. The Attain
leghanies and their western foothills: 3,
The fertile bottom lands of the Ohio val
ley. Extensive territories. were an incum-
brance In ante-railway days, and as a
egates Virginia consented to let her
western wilderness set up a government
of it's own. The new state was mapped
out along the line of a wholly arbitrary
southern frontier "a bee line about mid
way between the thirty-sixth and thirty
seventh parallel Of northern latitude.
and included districts as dissimilar as
Prussia and the Austrian highlands.
But these districts were first settled
by Virginia emtgrants, and contrived to
agree, but in the course of four genera
lions differences of soil and climate be-
gan to assume their influence. The
h~ighlanders and lowlanders, though Of
the same. parent stock, came to differ
as Scotch mountain Celts differ from
Irish cove Celts. Their dissimilar occu-
pations, Of course. developed differences
of interest, and, Of course, they disa-
greed. disputed. quarreled and finally re-
sorted to the ultima ratio. of .dissenters,
the logic of gunpowder arguments.
The politics of the state have got into
a ~distracting coil of ENHANCEMENT, get
ting more and more intricate and knotty
at every pull. Disentangling committees
add their threads of red tape and ag-
gravate. the difficulty by getting tangled
in one anOther's wigs.