Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 November 1883 — Why Divorce Is so Common To-day. [ARTICLE]

Why Divorce Is so Common To-day.

This generation sees divorce more frequent, not because men and women are more wicked, but because married life is made more difficult by the excitement and complexity and manifold strains of modern life, which render unhappy marriages more unendurable. A broad gap opens between the hot present and the dull quiet of other days, when the husband passed his day in a steady and continuous round of work, when no avenue in life but marriage opened before most women, and both men and women passed lives from which excitement, worry and the anxious rush of this day were absent. Any candid man who will reconstruct the life of sixty and eighty years ago will be convinced that, while , that day had in it much of secret wickedness—as court and church records show—it had also conditions much less likely to prevent two people from leading quiet, uneventful and reasonably happy lives together.— Philadelphia Press. There’s something wrong about this. The law allows the minister only $1 for marrying a couple, while the lawyer who divorces the same people gets anywhere from $lO to SI,OOO. The lawyer, if he is a man of honor, should divide with the parson, since it is plain that he would lose his fat fee, if in the first place the preacher didn’t make up his case by marrying the client.