ABSTRACT
Divorce as an institution has been permitted in most ages and countries for certain causes. It has never been intended to produce an alternative to the monogamic family, but merely to mitigate hardship where, for special reasons, the continuance of a marriage was felt to be intolerable. The law on the subject has been extraordinarily different in different ages and places, and varies at the present day, even within the United States, from the extreme of no divorce in South Carolina to the opposite extreme in Nevada. 1 In many non-Chrisitian civilisations, divorce has been very easy for a husband to obtain, and in some it has also been easy for a wife. The Mosaic Law allows a husband to give a bill of divorcement; Chinese law allowed divorce provided the property which the wife had brought into the marriage was restored. The Catholic Church, on the ground that marriage is a sacrament, does not allow divorce for any purpose whatsoever, but in practice this severity is somewhat mitigated – especially where the great ones of the earth are concerned – by the fact that there are many grounds for nullity. 2 In Christian countries the 144leniency towards divorce has been proportional to the degree of Protestantism. Milton, as everyone knows, wrote in favour of it, because he was very Protestant. The English Church, in the days when it considered itself Protestant, recognised divorce for adultery, though for no other cause. Nowadays the great majority of clergymen in the Church of England are opposed to all divorce. Scandinavia has easy divorce laws. So have the most Protestant parts of America. Scotland is more favourable to divorce than England. In France, anti-clericalism produces easy divorce. In the Soviet Union divorce is permitted at the request of either party, but as neither social nor legal penalties attach to either adultery or illegitimacy in Russia, marriage has there lost the importance which it has elsewhere, at any rate so far as the governing classes are concerned.
