Marriage and Divorce Laws.
By Editor
The United States Government has taken hold of polygamy, and if it results in no greater good than a public condemnation of the evil, it will have been worth while to pass the bill in Congress. We need a general law on marriage and divorce. The State laws on these matters are a mere burlesque of right and justice on the most solemn subjects—the most important relations. We are glad that the subject is being agitated. The Christian at Work speaks as follows:— “The marriage and divorce laws of scarcely two States in the Union are similar. They are stringent in some States and lax in others. Persons can marry in one State who cannot marry in another; they can be divorced in Connecticut when they cannot be separated in New York; they can get divorced in some States for mere incompatibility of temper, and in other States only for criminal conduct. Whether people are married or not would almost seem to depend on the State they happen to be in. So long as the people of different States had little intercourse with each other, and removals from one State to another were unfrequent, there was no urgent necessity for uniformity in laws relating to marriage and divorce. But now that railroads have made communication easy, and people are constantly changing their place of residence, it is of the greatest importance that an approximately uniform system of laws on these topics should be adopted.”