Mr. A. P. Herbert, M.P., hit on a telling phrase when he described unsuccessful marriages for which the law provides no remedy as a state of “holy deadlock.” His Bill to allow divorce for desertion, cruelty and incurable insanity, as well as for adultery, is now to become the law. Mr. Herbert is very proud of his contribution to human happiness and, doubtless, the amended law will simplify life's problems for a number of people, but the Socialist who reads the speeches of the M.P.s and the Peers as the Bill ran the gauntlet through the two Houses of Parliament will have other thoughts. He will be conscious that most of our legislators, both the elected and hereditary kind, do not appreciate at all what are the main problems of marriage for the greater number of the population. Consequently, their efforts to wrestle with divorce left them in a state of strangling deadlock equal to that of unhappy marriage. Much of the discussion was about the marriage problems of the well-to-do; quite naturally, for most of the legislators are themselves well-to-do. Then there were the Roman Catholics and some non-Catholics who believe that marriage is a “sacrament”—as they are quite entitled to do—but who are not content to refuse divorce themselves but want, in addition, to force their peculiar, and to many people detestable and immoral, attitude on the rest of the population. The Archbishop of Canterbury confessed himself torn between the desire to keep up the sanctity of married life, which he would like to believe exists, and his recognition that the present arrangements do not work out as he would like them to. He was forced, therefore, both to support and oppose the Bill, and refrained from voting. The sanest views were those of some of the medical men and lawyers in the House of Lords. But nearly all of them spoke as if marriage and divorce can be considered in a vacuum apart from the economic organisation of society. The fact is that capitalism makes it increasingly difficult for the population to make a success of marriage or of any other personal relationship. Looking for an ideal marriage law under capitalism is therefore as hopeless as asking the capitalist powers to honour the pious aspirations of die League of Nations. It is not in the main the greater or less facility for divorce that poisons the relationships of working-class men and women, but the problem of economic security, the need for adequate food, clothing and shelter, freedom from worry about war and unemployment and, of course, the need for the individual man and woman to be economically independent.
Socialism alone will provide these necessary conditions for successful marriage and without them not all the Peers and Bishops and Members of Parliament can do anything very much to improve things. It can be said in favour of any relaxation of the divorce laws that it is better for the individual men and women that they should use their own judgment in handling the problems arising out of their personal relationships than that their conduct should be forced on them by the law, but the major problems will still remain insoluble.
So the new law will be open to almost as much criticism as the old. In a few years' time we shall have the opponents of all divorce and the seekers for that impossibility: an ideal marriage law, combining to expose the hardships and miseries existing under the law. They will be quite right, except that the miseries are caused by capitalism and cannot be cured by tinkering with divorce laws.
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