DIVORCE COMPLICATIONS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 9, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 15.

DIVORCE COMPLICATIONS.

Marriage with Co-respondents. The Rights of Children.

THERE has been a good deal of comment of late on the fact that in the marriages of divorced persons a very large majority are with co-respondents or persons who might have been co-respondents.

The New York World cites the following authenticated instance to show in what complications such marriages may result: “A well-known New York woman, divorced from her husband in South Dakota seven months ago, has just married again in Indiana. Her former husband married, immediately after the divorce was granted, a woman whom he had ‘learned to love’ during his wife’s temporary absence from home, and who was divorced to marry him. Likewise the man whom the first wife has just married out West was divorced from his wife, by whom he had three children, that he might marry his new ‘affinity.’ To add to the complications of these triple divorces and remarriages, they would not be legal if contracted in the State where the parties originally lived. It only remains for the one deserted and unconsoled husband in this State to marry the abandoned wife out West to complete the serio-comic complexities and compensations of this medley of marriage-and-divorce up to date.”

A writer in the Outlook, who signs herself “Laica,” vouches for this incident: “Mrs. M., divorced, and with a son, married Mr. N., divorced, having a daughter, who remained with the former Mrs. N., who had also remarried. At a dancing-school these children met. Said the little girl, ‘So you have a new father at your house, I hear?’ ‘Yes,’ replied the little boy, ‘and a jolly good sort

he is, too—nicest chap I ever saw.’ ‘Pooh!’ said the little girl, ‘I know all about him; he was my father once.’” This writer continues: “Twelve years ago a young friend of mine in New York, just married, called my attention to one name on her visiting list as that of a woman who had been divorced and married again within a short time. It was the only name of the kind on the list. Last summer the same woman, a fashionable young matron, told me that her list now has the names of thirty-two such cases! In my own town, smaller than New York, I have counted up the divorced people I personally know. There are twenty-three cases. Of these, at least one out of each couple has married again, except in two instances, and of these two one died and the other is a Roman Catholic. Ten years ago I knew one case, and it was socially ostracized. Of the twenty-three cases I have just mentioned as personally known to me, only one couple had no children; therefore the light went out in twenty-two homes, as far as ‘home ideals’ to those children went. Allowing an average of three children to a family and twenty-two families, there will be in that small social world in the next generation sixty-six men and women minus much thought of home ties or their sacredness. Can any thinking person ask what will be the result on our morals?”

“The heart of all parenthood must throb with a great pity at the thought of the children of such second marriages as we have spoken of. But the children, ah! the children have come with no volition and have no redress, and their rights are only the rights we give them, and they can not claim them for themselves! An unwritten but universally accepted law forbids the marriage of those suffering from horrible mental or physical disease, for the sake of the possible children; why are we less careful in such cases of moral leprosy as divorced marriage threatens? For the sake of the actual children, are we not bound to take some measures for their protection? We must see that they get their rights. To secure pure morals in the next generation, this generation must live cleanly; and a high moral standard is an impossible product of homes where there are ‘exchanged partners.’”—Public Opinion.