--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Tanner, Joseph M. collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 21 number: 9 published: 1918-07 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: 'Tanner, Joseph M., "Problems of the Age—XXII–XXIV," *Improvement Era* 21, no. 9 (July 1918): 799–805.' source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera2109unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera2109unse start_page: 799 end_page: 805 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1918-07) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera2109unse publication_year: 1918 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1918, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # Problems of the Age—XXII–XXIV PROBLEMS OF THE AGE 801 XXIII —Divorce — Growth of Divorce. Easy and frequent divorce has become in the United States a scandalous condition. The state has always considered itself a third party to a marriage, and has therefore insisted that both marriage and divorce must be subject to the regulations of the law. While divorce can effect only by legal proceedings, the grounds for divorce have been so elastic, and judges so willing that unhappy marriages should be dissolved, that the daily grind of divorces in the United States has grown to enormous proportions, said to be one out of twelve marriages. There has been a wide divergence of opinion throughout the world on the subject. Religious organizations have considered it a sacrament of the church and have undertaken to regulate it by a religious ban upon those who were divorced under certain conditions. They forbade remarriage and punished religiously those who disregarded church requirements. The churches, however, have become less and less an important factor in the matter of divorce. The question is one of growing difficulty, owing to the increased disinclination to marry. Where divorce is difficult, marriage is restricted, and even where marriage exists wives and husbands live apart without any intention to marry again. Such a condition leads of course to gross immorality. Sexual relations and the love growing out of them are dominating factors in human life. What was intended to be a blessing, becomes a curse through the misuse of passion. How to control a God-ordained instinct in its proper exercise has been a most troublesome question from the dawn of history. There is of course only one proper channel of regulation, and that is marriage. Even marriage is no protection against the shocking abuses of human passion, and it often becomes a license rather than a right to be sacredly treated. Law cannot reach the most violent abuse of virtue in marriage relations; neither can it force man and wife to live together when they become obnoxious to each other. It can at best say that they shall not be divorced and that they shall not marry others. In England there has long been a partial divorce from "bed and table," but while such a law may prevent either from marrying, it does not really remedy a great social wrong. — Unwillingness to Marry. There is now an evil taking root in our social life more alarming than divorce, and that is the unwillingness of men to marry. It is estimated that fully one half of the men in the United States between 21 and 45 are unmarried. Late marriages are quite generally advocated, that is, late marriages for men. That fact gives rise to the so-called double standard that requires the strictest virtue in women and allows the greatest laxity in men. One of our metropolitan papers recently set up a justification for this standard by the argument that when a woman is untrue to her husband, he becomes intolerable to her and that she no longer loves him, while the opposite is true of man. Divorce is evaded in some countries by what is called in Germany wild marriage. Men and women under this system simply live together. If they have children they style themselves husband and wife, and the children, who often know nothing of their parents' status, address them as father and mother. The excuse of such a practice is of course the plea that divorce is impossible. Such a practice further admits of a great deal of shifting of men and women from one to another. The fact that women have lived with other men before marriage, and even where they have children, does not carry the same weight of objection in Germany that it does in other countries. — Partial Divorce. The evils above described are not the result of the ease or difficulty with which divorces may be procured. They are the result 802 IMPROVEMENT ERA of immoral natures which the conscience is unable to correct. In the absence of positive religious convictions, the conscience becomes a very elastic thing. It may be said that the trend of modern state requirements is in the direction of easier divorces. How far the laxity in matters of divorce can be carried without breaking down the present marriage system it is diffcult to say. There is a breaking point, however, in marriage where the state may become a party to it. At any rate the state may become an indifferent spectator. The Chicago Sunday Tribune, of August 26, 1917, prints the following from London: "That there are from 250,000 to 300,000 persons in Great Britain legally separated yet not divorced, is one of the statements in the report of the royal commission which has lately been investigating the divorce problem. "This, moreover, is only a beginning. Other multitudes of men and women who have been married continue not only married but without even legal authority, to live apart, although they do not and could not live together. Probably this second classification is larger than the first. "However greatly both husband and wife may wish it, they cannot be divorced unless there has been adultery on the wife's part, or adultery and also cruelty, on the husband's part." [Another in- stance of the double standard.] "Even advocates of easier divorce in some cases fear that this measure would make it too easy. But the people who have investi- gated do not. They describe fearfully immoral conditions widely existent because of the present difficulties of getting divorce. Immor- ality, illegitimacy, disease and a fearful number of cases of bigamy are numerated. Husband and wife legally bound to each other, yet le- gally separated, forced to lives of celibacy, lose all moral standards. The fact that they are commonly poor makes the results yet worse." — Wife Trading. Wife trading is another divorce evil which easy separation encourages, and yet it is not so baneful to society as the conditions described in Great Britain. Now and then such trading is given in the public print, and generally given in such humorous vein that the matter is treated as a joke rather than as a warning. A large public sentiment is indifferent to it. As I write the following appears in a New York paper from Havre, Montana, of August 26, the date on which the conditions in Great Britain are described: "Usually when a man falls in love with another man's wife there's a shooting affray. And again, when a woman gets to liking another woman's husband better than her own, there's the deuce to pay. But not so here! When Mrs. T., a wife of a prominent Havre lawyer, felt she loved the husband of Mrs. J. better than her own mate, she didn't hide the matter. Nor did Mrs. J. when she fell in love with Mr. T. Nor did Mr. T. when he took a liking to Mrs. J. Nor did Mr. J. when he became fonder of Mrs. T. than of his own wife. They all went to Boulder Hot Springs, obtained a divorce, and then by marriage made the trade complete. These neighbors each had a boy and a girl. After the trade one took the two boys and the other the two girls, and all parties were pleased with the new ar- rangements." "May they live happily ever afterward, almost any one will hope," is the closing sentence of this article. PROBLEMS OF THE AGE 803 — Dangers of Childless Lives. Such inroads made into family life are aided greatly by the absence of children in the home. It is an abortive attempt to substitute the pleasures of life for the God-ordained laws of our being. Some years ago a commission of eminent physicians met in Constantinople to make an investigation into the moral conditions of the Turks. The writer asked one of these physicians why such conditions as he described among the married women of France prevailed. "It is one of the simplest laws of nature," he replied. "When a man marries he usually makes a harlot out of his wife by the prevention of offspring. It is an easy step from harlotry of the home to promiscuous harlotry. A man by such a course sows the seeds of a deadly suspicion in his own mind, and reaps the harvest of marital despair. He robs himself of contentment and domestic happiness and pays the penalty nature has in store for him." Secret Evils.—An external survey of married life and of the causes which led to divorce is at most only superficial. The grosser evils belong to the secrets of the home, they are a part of the immoral nature of man. The patent remedies of the world today do not reach the seat of the disease. The true remedy lies in the return of man to the true worship of God, a worship in which he feels a direct responsibility to his Maker. The most sacred rights of woman have been overthrown. They are not economic or political, they are domestic, and yet she pursues political and social remedies that do not solve the question of her happiness. Her fundamental, indispensable rights to happiness are found in wifehood, motherhood, and perfect freedom in the control of her body. Indecency in married life may not be so baneful as promiscuous sexual intercourse, yet it lays the foundation of a great multitude of divorces. "Why marry at all?" is the soliloquy of millions of men who point to divorce and marital unhappiness as an excuse. The source of our present conditions must be sought in our own secret internal life. We can hardly say like the prophet of old: "Search me, oh God!" We do not need divine investigation. We have enough self-revelation to make us better if only we had the will and the faith necessary to bring us back into the paths which lead us to humility and righteousness. Increasing divorce is one of the strongest evidences of our departure from the way set by divine will. After the war, when our present social, economic, and political institutions will witness a vast disintegration, there may come to the world a higher standard of justice and faith. Much of the old must pass, for it is already in a state of decay. There is scarcely a condition of life that the war does not touch in some vital manner. From it will come a period of reconstruction, a period every thoughtful man should study. — Law of God. "The man is not without the woman in the Lord, neither the woman without the man." In marriage is to be found the highest estate of man or woman. Divorces are permitted by the Church though they are greatly deplored. (Doc. and Cov. 42:22,23; 49:15; 83:2; 132:18-20; I Cor. 11:11,12.) XXIV—Race Suicide Theory.—This subject is apparently as old as the human race. It has rested in the past as it rests in the present, upon the relative conditions of production and consumption. Theoretically, and argumentatively, it may be said that if the normal increase of human life went on without decimination by war or disease, the world would find it difficult to produce from all its known agencies the amount required for the sustenance of the human 804 IMPROVEMENT ERA There are, however, a number of forces in operation which are constantly tending toward the restriction of life. These forces or agencies have been counted upon to keep a normal balance without man's interference viciously with the laws of life. Whatever may be our theory about God's purposes in the world and the conduct of nations toward one another, it is certain that social forces are constantly acting in restraint of life and toward the destruction of life. These social conditions represent man's agency, his rebellion against the laws of God, his intelligence, and his fall from the highest state of his creation. We-need not attribute wars to God. Neither need we assign to him the causes^f pestilence, famine and all sorts of diseases. It is a common world in which we live, and nature is so regulated since the Creation that it is constantly working off waste or fetid matter and taking on new life. It is doing so with the human family. It is true we cannot reach satisfactory conclusions about the origin or even the justice, from a finite point of view, of all these unfavorable conditions to our existence. The question, then, of race suicide from the beginning is largely a question of whether man shall use violent and artificial means to add to the limitations or destruction of life. Shall he not rather leave the question of the earth' population to those conditions, those calamities and destructions which of themselves from all time have been sufficient to keep a normal balance between the needs and the production of the world's animals and man? — Methods. A little more than a century ago a writer by the name of Malthus took up the question of the world's population, and in r.a academic way sought to prove that some restraint must be put by man himself upon life in order to prevent the world from the fate of sure starvation if the human family were permitted to go on and people the earth more rapidly than it was able to provide for the people's sustenance. In the case of race suicide, as in the case of numerous other instances, men have set up artificial means in the place of those which in the nature of things belong to social life and the laws of nature. What would happen to this world of ours were the ideals of the Malthusian theory to prevail? But that is really beside the mark. The judgments of God have a very distinct place in the annals of history, and then there is the further fact that men have brought down upon them destruction by reason of their own retrograding movements. — Ancient Practices. Let us see how the ancient world undertook in its crude and cruel manner what in these days we are seeking to do by more refined means. Here it may be well to remark that what we call civilization is not always progress. Civilization too often has within it refined means of accomplishing ends that were sought in the barbarous ages by more cruel and inhuman methods. In the early stages of history race suicide was accomplished both through religious and economic purposes. The early inhabitants of Asia had a practice of offering up their first-born in order to propitiate their idolatrous gods. When the Israelites had settled in the Land of Promise, they found a people there who were practicing human sacrifice. In the days of Israel's glory which shone about the throne of Solomon, the God Moloch was set up in the Valley of the Hinnon, just below the City of David on the west, and there infants were offered in the fiery furnace of this heathen god. Among the tribes of Australia and the islands of the South Pacific there grew up a practice of burying children alive because they were wanted by parents or relatives that were waiting for them on the other side. Again various tribes that were nomadic in character often destroyed their children because in moving from place to place they could not care for them. These human sacrifices were generally performed by the men, PROBLEMS OF THE AGE 805 but in some of the lowest tribes the mothers joined in this hideous religious rite. Along the west coast of Africa, out of the control of the English, children were destroyed by mothers, and there was a belief among the Kaffir population of South Africa that unless they laid a lump of earth upon the mouths of their children and thus produced death, the parents would lose their strength. Madagascar was also noted for its infanticides. There were certain socalled unlucky days. Children born on such days were put to death l 806 IMPROVEMENT ERA m Samurai's heart,' says Professor Chamberlain. For is it not written by the great moralist Karbara Ekken, in the Owna Dargaku, 'It was the custom of the ancients, on the birth of a female child, to let it lie on the floor for the space of three days. Even in this may be seen the likening of the man to heaven and of the woman to earth." "Ever since the beginning of that indefinite period which we call 'modern times' the birth of a child has always been an occasion for rejoicing. To be sure, in Japan that joy was very much greater when it was a boy baby; yet the Japanese have never displayed such intense dislike to girl babies as have the Chinese. One great reason for this was that the population of Japan was not so dense as it is in China. It was easier to provide for children, and therefore there was no in- centive to put girl babies out of the way. I am sorry to say that very lately, since the Russo-Japanese war (1904-5), when the Japanese people are almost crushed by the weight of taxes to provide money with which to pay war expenses and to keep up army and navy, the number of cases of female infanticide is increasing alarmingly." — Semitic Races. It may be well here in passing to note that the Israelites and kindred races were not given as a rule to the practice of infanticide. The offering of human life was forbidden them, and in lieu of a command which God gave to Abraham to offer up his son Isaac, he provided for Abraham a "ram in the thicket." The Israelites were commanded, according to the law, to make sacrificial offerings of certain animals. The law of sacrifice is as universal and as old as the race. It also has certain divine support. It was practiced by Abel and Cain and the law of sacrifice was typical of that culminating sacrifice of God in which he offered his Son as a sacrificial atonement for the sins of the world. Man, however, in the practice of his sacrifices, has substituted his own ideas and emotions for the purpose and plans of God, for the only true order of sacrifice which God himself instituted, and which is also typical of the thousand sacrifices we make of the flesh in the processes of our earthly progression. The infidel objections to the sacrifice of Jesus are founded upon the practice of sacrifice in the heathen world. Prohibition in Canada By De Voe Woolf, LL. B. Some months ago the Union government of Canada passed an order-in-council prohibiting the importation of alcoholic drinks into Canada, and also prohibiting the manufacture of spirits for beverage purposes, in Canada. It goes still further and forbids interprovincial liquor traffic in all provinces where prohibition is in force. The announcement has also been made that the manufacture of ale, beer and porter will be prohibited immediately. The effect of this order-in-council is to cut off at one stroke of the pen a trade with foreign countries which, hitherto, has totalled nearly ten million dollars, and which has contributed an annual revenue to the country in custom duties of about fifteen million dollars. : PROHIBITION IN CANADA 807 The custom returns for the year ending March 31, 1914, show that 2,082,194 gallons of ale, heer and porter valued at $1,338,893, and 4,862,063 gallons of spirits and wines valued at $7,392,235, were imported into Canada. The total value of these liquors amounted to $8,731,228, and the duty collected totaled $14,543,441. The volume of imports of this nature in the year ending March 31, 1914, totaled 6,944,257 gallons. In the year 1915-16 the three western provinces Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta went dry. Ontario soon followed, likewise New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and British Columbia. There was a marked falling off of imports during that year. For the year ending Sept. 30, 1917, the custom returns show 135,210 gallons of ale, beer and porter, valued at $106,426, and paying a duty of $63,982 and 2,603,761 ; gallons of spirits and wines valued at $4,182,710 and paying duties of $5,036,509. It will be noted that even with prohibition in practically all of Canada, general war conditions in the civilized world, and the submarine menace of 1916-17, the traffic in spirits and wines in 1917 was almost 42 per cent of what it had been in the ante-war, ante-prohibition year of 1914. Virtually all that remains of the flourishing traffic in liquor in Canada is the infinitesimal stocks on hand in the province of Quebec. Within three years vested interests, generally considered the strongest and most powerful in Canada, have been swept out, with a few strokes of the pen; and a trade generally conceded to be impregnably established, has been abolished. The government describes the orders-in-council as war measures, designed to conserve food, and to release shipping facilitiesfor proper purposes. But any government will never attempt to reinstate these interests and this traffic after the war. Prohibition has come to stay in Canada. i iiiii in iiimiiiiiiimi minium nun in mill mi mini miimi mi i iimiiii i^ 1 One of the speakers at an officers' meeting of the Y. M. | 1 M. I. A., in the June Conference, suggested the following | 1 as a good resolution for officers to make and live by I will take an interest in my duties, and will not be J satisfied with slip-shod and merely passable work, either I | in myself or in the officers under me doing my own — | | 1 part promptly and as well as I can, and then helping | J others to do their part. I will do all this in a cheerful | | spirit, realizing that petulancy and pessimism depress | 1 all the workers, and injure all the work. minim iiiiiuiuiiu iiiiuiimiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimii in m in i i ""»u.= inmiimmimimi mil i