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Show LONDON DIVORCE MILLS GRINDING Record Number of Cases Awaiting Freedom From Marriage Yoke . in CARLE ( in i I S (International New- Service Stall orrespondent LONDON. Oct. 12 The mills of London's divorce court?' started grinding grind-ing With another new record docket and a bharp movement on the part of Justices and attorneys alike against the "dlVorcf bj agreement." habit Opening of the Michaelmas term of the courts found 2 600 mlsmated cou-1 pies awaiting freedom. In most cases, they are wartime marriages. Con-st.iiiUv, Con-st.iiiUv, sine-.- the arnilsllcc. thf total of petitions has mounted, term by term, until djvorce h.i' become more than excr a national Issue In America the figure would not he astonishing, for a population of the size of London's. Rut In pre-war days the annual divorce figures here, due to more stringent ,ws and the nifliienee of the .Kite church, were very low. All Knglnnd gie. attention to the Startling Increase and more especially to the charges of collusion in obtaining obtain-ing decrees which are heard about the law courts. h is the view of tin- authorities and tin- Judge of the divorce court, and also that or the director of public prosecutions' says the Globe, "thai cases of perjury in the divorce court are so numerous and so flagrant that I II Is necessary for them to be brought before th' criminal court." Thf Evening News announces that the court's interest in divorce hy fraud will nol be confined to preventing such cases being heard in ihe future, i "A very large number of the cases In which divorce decrees were granted grant-ed last tern, are r-ceivlng scrutiny." I ha i paper states. "In a number of : cases mi' panic nave oe. n ,n im-'i thai the King's ProctCr will oppose ; the decrees being loach absolute. GRT (.H l K icno "During last term some hundreds of decrees weer given during the las? j fortnight, when, as one official puts It,' divorces were handed out like shell- lug peas.' ' R A 171) 1 S SK K N In pre-war times the King's I'roetor 1 seldom hid lo Intervene because of! fraud In divorce proceedings mote ill in a seoi' of times each year. During Dur-ing Ho la I four months he has Inter j vencd in seventy rases. OnC Immediate effect of this agitation agita-tion will be a tightening of the conditions' condi-tions' governing divorce In so-called "poor a-. " When Ihe eliding of Ihe war revealed marital infidelities and married un ha pplm-ss in tnanv l'oms among the hluh and low alike, a provision provi-sion was made for cheap divorce" for the poor, bj slate aid II was argued thai the high Cosi of litigation condemned con-demned many to yokes from which thev scaped only at an i penes to the nation of Increased immorality. So the state which with its church frowns upon divorce Justified making divorce easier for the workingman It has been proved the fraud was easily practiced in these eases, partly localise unskilled law clerks dealt with the casea Conditions under which Ihe poor person laws" may be invoked in-voked in divorce cases have already been radically revised. |