Since that count was taken, there has been no evidence of a halt in the tendency of the United States to lead the rest of the Christian world in this matter of separation of those once joined together by marriage vows.

In some of the States, the showing is more pronounced on the side of free divorce than in other States, since in Washington, Oregon, and Montana one divorce to every five marriages is reported, in Colorado and Indiana one to every six, and in Oklahoma, California, and Maine one to every seven marriages.

We need not accept the doleful suggestion of Professor Willcox that if we go on this way, "by 1950 one-fourth of all marriages will be terminated by divorce, and by 1990 one-half so terminated," for it is not necessary or likely that we shall "go on" in this particular.
Already, movements toward the strengthening of family ties and the better training of youth to responsibility, movements that tend to make marriage less brittle, are inaugurated.
=Cannot Now Make Family an Autocracy.=--There are several points that all must agree upon if we are to stay the rush to the divorce courts and yet not attempt the futile task of turning the family order back to the patriarchal or the monarchical types.

In those types there was little or no legal divorce, it is true, but in them inhered social evils that often killed the spirit of marriage, and doomed the children of enforced unions to physical weakness, mental defectiveness, moral taint, and affectional suffering.
First of all, it should be noted that, although the divorce statistics are serious indictments of American life and bode ill to American society, they are not wholly a testimony to bad conditions.

They are also a testimony that he who runs may read, to the determination of men, and especially of women, to exact a higher reality of mutual love, mutual respect, mutual service, and mutual cooeperation within the marriage bond.
=New Standards of Marriage Success.=--When it was decided to investigate the causes for the backwardness of school children, why so many "failed to pass" and were "retarded" in the march from grade to grade in the elementary classes, the first inquiry took no note of the exactions of the grade standards.