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Show FIGURES. A story told in figures is one which nearly everybody passes up as stale, flat and unprofitable. Figures are cold, heartless things and do not appeal ap-peal to most people. To others they are a never-ceasing never-ceasing source of amusement and study. Back of the figures the imagination -plays with the desires and passions of people; it see3 woe and dismay and j misery and. joy and gladness a thousand fanciful J dreams, all compressed into one short sentence. Simple statements made in figures may be full of truth, but in this busy world when we glibly speak of millions while possessed only of units, the full meaning is sometimes lost. We read in a newspaper "all sorts" column that 1,733,000 persons were divorced in the United States during the past twenty years. It is a simple, matter-of-fact statement, with no embellishments of any kind and is simply intended to convey to the people an idea of how America moves. The "all sorts" column is not given to speculative analysis of the things dealt with, and nothing of a statistical statisti-cal nature is admitted unless it exceeds a million. Granting these figures on divorce are correct, or even approximately so, inasmuch as they are probably based on reports of the census bureau, what a tale of woe and warning may be written j about them; 1,733,000 persons divorced in twenty years; 806,500 marriages annulled: 806,500 homes broken up by order of the courts. Big figures these worthy of an "all sorts" column. But divide them up: 1,733,000 divided by 20, the number of years covered, and the result is an average of 86,-C50 86,-C50 a year, or 237 a day, Sundays and holidays included. in-cluded. The figures are heart-breaking in the wreck of the ideals of the sufferers; they spiell to high heaven. heav-en. And besides the husbands and wives, there are the thousands and thousands of children whose early lives partake of a bitterness which should never be theirs. The strange secretiveness of their one parent when in childish innocence inquiry is made for the other, who can explain? Children whose earliest recollection is parental disagreement and who no more know the name of father or the name of mother, with what cynicism and distorted notions of the home must they grow up! And what strange ideals of marriage and the sacredness of the marriage vow must be theirs! And with what subtle poison is the social fabric inoculated ! It is all too trite to say that the home is the foundation upon which the nation is built, but when the figures 6how more than a hundred hearth-fires hearth-fires deadened every day there is room indeed to inquire in-quire into the guarantee the nation has for perpetuity. per-petuity. For the protection of the nation should this evil be checked if not to follow the divine injunction. in-junction. The divorce laws of the nation would be a farce were they not so tragic in their operation. opera-tion. The people either do not recognize the peril ahead or are indifferent to the far-raching consequences conse-quences which will follow. |