Show Defects of our Marriage and Divorce Laws Lawful marriage is the basis of family relation and the family relation rela-tion is the fundamental principle of association upon which the super strnatare of society and the elate is milt And yet there is no contract of the value ol twenty dollars subject to the verdict of jury or the decision 01 f a court that is so easily avoided and so shamefully dissolved as the contract at marriage The facts show that the law and the courts enforce he obligations of a delinquent debtor with more severity than the obliga iona of this contract upon which the happiness of the family the morality of society and the perpetuity of the state depend The marriage contracts ia a higher inspiration and has a broader > obligation than a mere contract con-tract for the payment of money or for the transfer of property or for oooporation in business It is one in which society is more deeply interested inter-ested one by which society is more seriously affected and society has the right to demand that the mutual obligations igations shall be faithfully kspt and awfully enforced This lack of uniformity in the laws both in their formulation and execution execu-tion is the result of the diversity of sources from which they emanate Each state is its own authority and determines for itself the conditions upon which the marriage relation pits p-its people may be entered into or dissolved dis-solved and perhaps the social and moral sentiment of the people of a state can not be more equitably determined de-termined than by observing the character char-acter and use of its laws governing marriage and divorce for the various degrees of restriction and laxity in marriage and divorce have marked the progress and decline of all peoples and nations ever since the days when Adam and Eve went out of paradise and Moses wrot the law on Mount Sinai Several states still retain upon their statute booke the commonlaw prohibition of marriage between persons per-sons related by consanguinity or affinity nearer than the third degree while other states have progressed to t < that decree of liberality on the road to individual freedom and universal happiness which permits a person to marry if not his grandmother at least the daughter of his wife by a t former husband So we find that while two persons within certain degrees of relationship may lawfully marry in one state they are prohibited prohib-ited from marrying by the laws of another state and that while a marriage mar-riage between certain persons is avoidable only in one state it is abso lutely void under a similiar law in another state Gordon A Stewart in Popular Science Monthly |