sertion without ceremony, the homes that were wrecked were outnumbered at least four to one by happy families that were unbroken. These unbroken families in every period, for the sake of the nation and the world, should fortify themselves by making it harder to be divorced, and easier for mates to keep the vow to take each other "for better or for worse."

It was also seen in 1922 that we must have an international divorce law by treaty, for Paris was becoming an international Reno, and the confusion of national divorce laws sometimes worked as disastrously as the confusion of State laws. But it was seen to be useless for our Government to ask other nations to consider international divorce legislation until we should make a federal law.

Roots of Divorce in Wrong Training

Anti-divorce laws and rules of "good form" are but tardy efforts at "cure" when more effective "prevention" should have been achieved by right teaching as to marriage in home and school and church. It is easier to pre

The International Reform Bureau, of Washington, D. C., will aid to secure the divorce reform laws needed, both national and international laws, and better State laws, and especially more faithful administration. This is one of the fields in which lawyers have most seriously yielded to the lure of commercialism to the serious detriment of the general public. In all efforts for divorce reform the hidden, if not open opposition of divorce lawyers must be taken into account and a watch set against their devices. Send at any time for latest news of the movement and literature and petitions; also for latest word on any theme discussed in this book; on all of which consult also Part II and Alphabetical Index at the close of the book. We wish especially to call attention of the public to the fact that every year most valuable documents on many aspects of social betterment are printed by the various departments of the Government for free circulation. It is not creditable to any parent, pastor, or teacher if he does not avail himself of the information thus offered that would increase his helpfulness to old and young. It would increase patriotism also if people were "shown' how much wise planning for "the general welfare" there is in the various branches of our Government. When we add to the great store of free literature that Government agencies are eager to give to all interested, the equally abundant and equally useful documents that a thousand welfare agencies are waiting to give away or furnish at nominal cost, there is no excuse for any citizen neglecting to do his part, and do it intelligently, in remedying the unusually serious moral and social conditions that are the dirty camp followers of the World War, but will not vamoose without a struggle.

vent than to repent. Many a boy or girl enters into marriage as a "lark," and soon turns up in the divorce court, because in his or her childhood home marriage was commonly spoken of as a joke.

When true love began its shy and beautiful budding in two young folks, their associates, old and young, were commonly too dull in courtesy to see that it should be ignored in silent respect, and, instead, there was coarse laughter and boorish jesting. And when there was a marriage, the whole neighborhood mobbed the married pair with tin horns and old shoes and confetti. The rice is not so bad for it is a symbolic prayer that the marriage may be fruitful in happy children.

Fathers and mothers and newspapers often applaud as "a good catch," a marriage in which a girl marries a vicious man for whom she has no supreme affection, only to win a fortune or a title. And many a father and mother show manifest approval when a man of notorious immorality, if rich, seeks the companionship of their daughter-sometimes even allowing moral risks in the idea that if the daughter gets into "trouble" she may be "married to make her respectable," in accordance with the crude code of honor that even dishonorable men sometimes accept.

Marriage is the normal career for which every woman should be trained from the hour her maternal instinct is first recognized by giving her a doll-no Teddy bear should displace it-on through the days when she is given the responsibility of "little mother" in the care of younger children. It is a loss to the nation that so many girls are sent to shops and offices and factories when they should be learning a woman's highest art of home-making in every detail.

And though other reasons for divorce, which are

thought more adequate, are commonly given, I have no doubt that poor housekeeping, due to lack of proper training of many if not most of our girls, is one of the things that most frequently begins the trouble. As the poet says of the husband

"Endowed perhaps with genius from the gods
But apt to take his temper from his dinner."

Teachers and pastors should diligently fight the fallacy that parents are to be ignored by sons and daughters they love better than their own lives when the latter come to life's most momentous act, the selection of a mate. The public, including the press, instead of honoring elopements as something romantic, should usually brand them as foolish and wicked disloyalty to parents. The folly of elopements is demonstrated in the large percentage of them that end in the divorce court-said to be 25 per cent. The public should remember that an elopement proclaims aloud that one or more minors, regarded by civilization as too young to act without parental sanction, have rebelled against the authority that God and the Church and the State have vested in parents. It is bad enough when a man or woman past twenty-one disregards the loving advice of good parents but there should be a strong public opionion, and perhaps a rule of good form as well as a civil law, to deter a minor from a marriage that lacks parental approval. Increasingly State laws are insisting on consent of parents in case of minors, and probably national public sentiment will require such a provision in the federal law if Congress is given power by Constitutional amendment to make one. But in any case public opinion should be educated to frown on marriages that trespass on parental rights, and the press should be constrained to express that reasonable stand in its news

and editorial columns. The best way to decrease divorces is to multiply marriages in which there is that supreme affection without which no marriage is justified, supplemented by supreme loyalty, like the loyalty of a soldier to his country.

National Council of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in Report on American Home Life, August, 1922:

Where family life is dishonored, wedding unfaithfulness lightly regarded, parental responsibility neglected, filial respect and obedience slighted, there, we may be sure, society is rotten at the core. We tremble for the future of a State or nation where lax theories concerning domestic life gain ground. Even laxer practise will certainly prevail.

The remedy for the frightful dissolution of the marriage tie going on in America and its inevitable consequences of race suicide is to be found in Christian training alone. Remedial legislation, while imposing difficulties in the way of easy annulment, does not go to the root of the evil. It attacks many outward symptoms of the disease and is of undobuted value, but it does not destroy the germ of the evil or cure it at its source.

Boys and girls must be taught as early as possible that the chief purpose of marriage is the perpetuation of the race, involving the begetting and education of children for the work of the world. Marriage is a high and holy vocation, because the married pair are cooperating with the Creator in the continuance of the human race.