Does this also indicate that such failure of character has increased among our people to the extent of its increased legal recognition in divorce?
We can not think so.

There are special reasons why all bonds of intimate association are strained in modern life, with its separate industrial, social, and educational affiliations for each individual.

But that all of us are going downward, or most of us, is not a provable contention and should not be an undemonstrated inference.
=Dangers of Extreme Individualism in Marriage.=--The primary fact is that we have allowed individualism in marriage to go beyond limits which are socially safe, just as in the economic order and in the administration of political affairs, we have supposed that the "let-alone-policy" would work social good.

No other civilization has been able to secure successful family life without some support, supervision, control, and aid to the married couple and their children, from without.

We cannot return to the collective family of other days.