286
The Green Bag
regards as a feudal or barbaric conception of marriage, blind him to the fact that one of the chief causes of the increase in divorce has been woman's lessening ability to adapt herself to functions which fonnerly helped to make the home, in a greater degree, a unit, and to preserve it, as a unit, from dissolution. The author's forecast of the probable out come of the tendencies he sketches is not completely satisfactory. He allows himself to be led away into regions of fruitless specu lation, as when he reasons out the somewhat surprising position that the economic in dependence of woman and resulting economic equality of the sexes are to result in a lower
rather than in a higher rate of divorce.
He
opens a path to a Utopia in which optimism seems to get the better of science. If he had more prudently adopted the view that woman can never achieve complete economic in dependence, he might have been in a better
position to predict an improvement in social conditions. He might well have avoided looking so far into the future, and it would have been better had he treated divorce as he had previously intimated that suicide, insanity, and crime should be treated (p. 156) and been satisfied to stop at that point. No one supposes that because suicide has been increasing the race is likely to die out, and in the same way the growth of divorce furnishes no ground for the fear that the family is doomed. Economic changes, not to speak of other factors, may bring in their train suicide, crime, and in sanity as the efiects of intensified strife, but economic change is spasmodic rather than continuous, and there must always be a limit beyond which such symptoms of social maladjustment cannot go. There is there fore no occasion for uneasiness about the future, and such a fear arises only from the attempt to look too far ahead.
Then and Now By HARRY R. BLYTHE AN OLD TIMER IS brow was high and mighty, He stood six feet or more,
A NEW TIMER E has no art of phrasing,
He talks quite ill at case
His speech was grand and flighty, He loved to pace the floor.
And yet it is amazing
His gestures were tremendous His climaxes sublime, He spoke in prose stupendous
He never tears the eagle Nor rises to the heights; His manner is not regal,
And often burst in rhyme.
How well his speeches please.
He simply thinks—and fights.
He bullied and dissembled, And wrenched the roots of law Till all the court room trembled And juries sat in awe.
He is not good at posing, He can inspire no awe,
He was the “Great Unbeaten," The pride of all the town Too bad the years have eaten The gilt from his renown!
In short, his legal station
He never tries bulldozing— He knows far too much law.
Is marred by no pretense; He has no reputation
Except for common sense.
