All who failed to move on at the scheduled moment for "promotion," in any school examined, were listed as "backward." Later, it occurred to the investigators, that the first thing to find out was whether or not a given grade standard was one that true pedagogy would approve, and second, whether there was a serious discrepancy in that grade standard between the different schools from which the children came for examination.
In much the same way the first inquiries as to the evil of frequent divorce seemed to take for granted that all who sought divorce were in circumstances that might have been socially and usefully continued within the marriage bond.

We know better now.

We know that the first question to ask about a broken family is: What was its condition before the break?
Did justice, and a fair estimate of the quality of the union and its effects upon the man and the woman involved, and their children, demand that the family hold or be held together, or was there a condition that made society more interested in the ending than in the continuance of that union?
If, as is beginning to be understood, it is not for the interest of society that men and women should marry who are so physically diseased, or mentally defective, or morally perverted as to make them injurious members of a family circle, is it not as clear that in many cases such persons when married are not helpful members of any family; and if so, again, is it not clear that there is justification in social need itself for the removal of such persons from the family circle they have already polluted or injured in vital ways, to prevent their doing more harm to family life?
Whatever may be thought by many who view all divorce with horror, there is a tendency within that movement toward free divorce, toward the freeing of the currents of generative life from evil influence, from despotism, from degenerative tendencies, and from the worst forms of social wrong-doing.

There is, also, of course, in that movement, a testimony which should make all earnest lovers of their kind learn how to urge socially therapeutic treatment, a testimony to human weakness, to a lack of the sense of responsibility, to a love of personal pleasure at any cost to moral obligation, and to a need for social control of the whole family relation.
The causes, in our country, for which more than 90 per cent, of the divorces are granted, are the serious ones of adultery, cruelty, imprisonment for crime, habitual drunkenness, desertion, and neglect to provide for the family.

This indicates that in most cases there has been a failure on the score of basic family requirements from husbands and wives, and from fathers and mothers, before the court was called in to break the legal bond.