Polygamy, under the name of Mormonism, is still tolerated and protected in the United States, and the annals of divorce in the states where Mormonism is illegal quite make up the deficiency. In Connecticut, according to the deposition of the Rev. Dr. Woolsey, President of Yale College, made before the Western Social Science Congress in Chicago, the ratio of divorce is one in every eight marriages. We were told by a distinguished New England convert that the Vermont marriage law was practically so lax that the following “cause” for a divorce was considered legal: A couple, not very long married, mutually wished for a separation, simply on the score that they were dissatisfied with their bargain. They went to a lawyer to ascertain the technicalities of the case, and were told—appearances having to be saved!—that some specific cause must be alleged. The easiest was cruelty. But the parties had never been violent; so the lawyer suggested that the husband should, in his presence, give his wife a “blow.” This was soon accomplished by a light slap on the cheek of the willing “victim”; cruelty was pleaded, and the divorce obtained.
In Rhode Island, the proportion of divorces to marriages in 1869 was one to fourteen, and the law of that state leaves it practically to the discretion of the courts to annul any ill-assorted marriage on the ground of [pg 781] uncongenial temper, desertion, drunkenness, or any sort of bad conduct. In that year, out of 166 divorces, only 66 were granted on the plea of adultery, while it must also be borne in mind that this grave charge is often unjustly and maliciously made to cover some shameful behavior on the part of the plaintiff, or to gratify his or her revenge. Speaking of a clergyman who was reported to have married one man successively to five wives, all of whom were living at the same time, a Protestant paper comments thus on the story: “It may be true or false. It is not altogether improbable. It suggests very serious reflections, as indicating what is possible under our laws, and the course things are taking in American society.” The paper goes on to speak of the clergyman's responsibility in such a case, and although advocating the desirability, “for many reasons,” of the office of solemnizing marriage being “confined almost entirely to ministers of the Gospel,” does not see that it stultifies itself directly after by explaining that “the trust is reposed in them, not by any right to it on their part, as holding an ecclesiastical office, but on account of their position and general character(!). They are able to guard marriage, and give it a religious character and sanction. But they act, so far as the law goes, simply as civil magistrates.”
And let us add that here is precisely the evil, and that as long as clergymen are lowered to the level of magistrates, loose morals will never be uprooted.
The Nation of March 2, 1871, has the following:
“We cut from the marriage notices of the Philadelphia Press the following illustration, omitting names, of the way in which attempts to reduce human marriages to the level of those of the lower animals are dressed up in fine language:
“ ‘In Philadelphia, February 23, S—— and S——, the parties protesting against all marriage laws, whether legal or conventional, which subject either the wife or the husband to any control or influence on the part of the other which is not in accordance with the dictates of pure and mutual love.’
“This is, of course, simple ‘pairing.’Marriage means the assumption by a moral agent of an obligation to perform certain duties, even after they become disagreeable. The arrangement by which the parties live together as long as they find it thoroughly pleasant is that common among birds, beasts, and fishes, and has nothing human about it.”
The Independent, a Protestant religious paper, sneers at all barriers to divorce, Catholic, Protestant, or civil, as “shallow,” and declares that “no matter with what solemn ceremony the twain may have been made one, yet when love departs, then marriage ceases and divorce begins.”
A certain unhappy section of those waifs of womanhood, the advocates of woman's rights, is known as the champion of “free-love,” that is, in plain words, adultery. Mrs. Stanton, one of the leaders, has said somewhere that “marriage is but a partnership contract terminable at the will of the parties,” and has advocated marriages for three years.
To this last proposition we have only one objection. Why three years? If a marriage is based on mere passion, three months or six at the furthest would be enough to exhaust the cohesive element, for if the adage be true that “no man is a hero to his valet,” it is equally certain that no man and woman could by any human possibility live together for that time in the familiar intercourse implied by marriage, without discovering to each other certain asperities of temper, inequalities of disposition, in short, all the little meannesses of our poor human nature. This disenchantment, following the [pg 782] close and daily companionship that is almost inevitable in married life, is enough to kill passion, though it cannot even daunt principle. Again, in a marriage based on passion, the satiety that follows in the train of unlawful love would be reproduced, and would break up the connection in far less than three years. In fact, when we come to sift the question, we find that, putting aside the religious spirit presiding over marriage, that state of life has no appreciable sign to distinguish it from the score of illicit connections punished by law or branded by society. We find here almost a parallel to the question lately agitated in England among Episcopalians, as to the reason why the Church of England should be called a “church,” and not, like all other independent Protestant bodies, a “sect.” We ask, What is to distinguish such a “marriage” as our modern reformers advocate from the “liaisons” at which society pretends to be so virtuously shocked? Where is the intrinsic difference between a woman who sells her honor to many men at once and one who surrenders it to a single man at a time for just that period during which pleasure shall keep her constant to him?