Salt Lake Tribune | 1919-03-22 | Page 6 | Divorce Evil

. DIVORCE EVIL. Advocates of uniformity in and reform re-form of the divorce laws will doubtless find an argument in their favor in the figures just made public by the census bureau at Washington, showing that approximately one out of every nine marriages in the United States is ter-mipated ter-mipated by divorce. Excluding South Carolina, where all laws permitting divorce di-vorce were repealed in 1S73, the three lowest divorce rates in 1916, for which year returns are now complete, are shown for the District of Columbia, North Carolina and New York, where the rates were 13, 31 and 32 per hundred thousand of population, respectively. The highest rates were returned for Nevada, Montana and Oregon, which show 607, 323 and 225, respectively. In all states except Maine, West Virginia, Vir-ginia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Mis-sissippi, North Dakota, South Dakota and Colorado, the divorce rates were higher in 1916 than in 1906. Desertion is shown by the figures to have been the cause for about 38 per cent of the divorces. The records also show that the marriage rate in 1916 was 1050 per 100,000 of population, or nine times as great as the divorce rate of 112 per 100,000. In the past few years state lawmakers, law-makers, recognizing the increasing rate in cases of desertion have enacted more stringent legislation bearing on that crime, and future data referring to divorce actions is likely to record a decrease in the percentage of this cause for legal separations. The fact that one in nine of marriages contracted in this country ends in the wreck of the matrimonial matri-monial barque, suggests the evils of hasty alliances and easy facilities for getting rid of connubial partners.