Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1907-09-30
PINE BLUFF ARKANSAS, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3o 1eo7

remedies for the divorce evil Re 1 urged that diyorces should be made
 more difficult to obtain by reducing : the legal grounds for divorce from
 the five grounds that We have in | Arkansas, namely felony, excessive cruelty, assertion, drunkeness and lnfidelity (not counting two causes that antedate marriage), to one or
 two, namely intidelity and perhaps 1 excessive cruelty. He pointed out
 the fact that the tendency of legis- latlon was directed in that way; that in England divorce is granted
 only on the grounds of infdelity and likewise in the District of Columbia, as a result of recently enacted
 law. The conditions prerequisite
 for the obtainment of divorce should
 also be made more severe; he said.
 Between six months and year of
 residence should be required, the
 application should be carefully
 sifted so that instead of granting
 two-thirds or four-ffths of the ap-
 plications, as is done in our country
 We should try to approach the re- cord of Buenos Ayres, Brazil, where in the ten years prior to 1884 only
 11S applications were granted out of 2,139.
 The courts having Jurisdiction over divorce" continued the speaker, should likewise be reduced in num- ber in order to prevent loca, abuses. There are something like three thous- anG divorce courts in the United States while all of the divorce cases ill England are handled in one court, a condition also existing in the state of New Jersey. Special attempts should be made to adjust differences by jurists. To aid in this, six months Or year should be required between the granting of the decree and it's final issue. Separation from bed and board, as it prevails in France, should be made use of instead of absolute divorce, wherever possible in the hope Of reconciliation being effected in the meantime.
 However, l am opposed to the canonical theory that insists on the indissolubility of marriage and conse- quently refuses to grant divorce alto gether. Whether we like it or not We must recognize that occasionally at least cases arise where an amica- ble settlement of differences is impos- sible. In such cases an absolute di- vorce is necessary.
 Bishop in his Marriage and Divorce remarks that the prevalence and par tial legal recognition of concubinage are the effects of the refusal of abso- lute divorce in South Carolina, which is the only state in the Union that will not give divorce on any grounds
 'The second method of minimiz- ing the evil is by establishing penal ties upon the offending party. In Germany imprisonment is sometimes resorted to for infidelity and in New York State desertion has been made a felony. But more important than these measures is that of making remarri- age difficult for the guilty party, Would it not be advisable to make un- versal some such law as that which prevails in Massachusetts, for in stance, where the guilty one may not remarry for two years and then only with the permission of the court Or the still stricter law of New York, which provides that the defendant is not permitted to remarry in the lifetime of the plaintiff, except by the permis- sion of the court, or if, after five years have passed, the plaintiff has mar ried as the defendants conduct has been uniformly good during the in terval. At all events some radical steps ought to be taken to put an end to this mode of casting off ones wife or husband as one casts off an old suit of clothes.
 But legal measures cannot ac complish much unless the inner causes of the evil be removed. Of what good is the amputation of the limb when the poison affects the whole body. The first underlying cause of divorce is ill advised marriages. Now i'll advised marriages may be classed in at least two groups. First, mar riages in which there is too much sen timent or rather sentimentality, and too little reason, if any at all. These are the foolish unions in which both of the pair lose their heads. She does