The fact of divorces, however, whether they be many or few, is to the writer a symptom, not a cause, the legal expression of a social disease, not the disease itself.

Bad diagnosis, or inadequate treatment on the basis of a symptom, may increase the disease; and the facts concerning divorce are of so serious a nature that a separate chapter has been assigned to them under the heading: The Broken Family.

The prevalence of divorce, however, it must here be said, demonstrably proves two things--one that men and women now feel themselves at moral and social liberty to seek divorce when longer living together seems to them intolerable, and that women are using their new freedom and economic independence to make marriage conditions more to their liking.

They are setting a standard respecting desirable husbands, not always wisely, often selfishly, but in the long run and large way to ends of greater equality of demand in the marriage relation.

The tendency on the whole is toward a higher conception of what marriage should be and what it should do for both parties in the bond.