tion, be seen to grant the larger part of their divorces to people who were married within the State, this part of the problem that relates to migration for divorce, grave as it is, is a very small part of the whole, and must take a subordinate place in the larger one of divorce and marriage as a whole. Until the statistics appear, we cannot wisely make predictions. But certainly there has been grave danger, very grave had there been the least probability of actual amendment, that premature national legislation would have done harm. It would have removed frauds while at the same time it might have swollen the great stream of divorces, restricting its volume here and there, but not as a whole. There are other and most important elements coming into the problems of legislation. At first the call for amendment was confined to the subject of Divorce. But polygamy in the Territories has long confronted us. If Utah became a state she might go back to polygamy. A general constitutional provision for the whole country then seemed necessary. But further experience showed also that in Utah polygamy needed to be reached through a radical change in the territorial law of marriage. Accordingly, Congress has probably given Utah, alone of all the Territories, an adequate marriage law and one that is much better than those of most of the States. Meanwhile, and even before this, the more careful students of these subjects saw that the marriage laws of the several States and Territories were in a tangled condition of looseness and conflict as well as those relating to divorce. In some way like this, most who have written of late years on constitutional amendment have usually been led to couple marriage and divorce together, including the specific topic of polygamy under the former terin. A very great service has been rendered by Mr. Frank Gaylord Cook in a series of articles, a year ago, in the "Atlantic Monthly," on the Celebration of Marriage in the United States and Europe, as seen in the light of the historical and comparative method. He has shown how that, while Europe has been steadily moving towards a scientific and uniform system, our own drift has been in an important respect the other way. And soon the appendix to the government report will give us an opportunity to make a fuller comparison between the marriage and divorce laws of Europe and our own. My own reflection upon the various material and elements of our own problems led years ago to the probable conclusion that these various elements, including also such other matters as those of inheritance, chastity, and children, were after all but fragments of one whole covered by the single word Family. Certainly as the movements have gone on in the last few years, there has been a convergence of thought in this direction. It seems impossible to study all the elements presented in Mr. Wright's investigation without at least raising the question whether one of the deeper lessons of it is not just this one of the unity of various social and legal problems in the great one of Family. It has seemed to me that our legislation has generally been too much the expression of our fragmentary thinking on these subjects, and that the organic nature of the subjects is likely to be recognized soon. This makes the national problem one of very much greater significance than it is as commonly understood. The conflict of marriage and divorce laws is no small affair. But it must be seen in its proper place and proportions. When thus viewed, it indicates a very different treatment than is popularly demanded on the implication that it covers the larger ; way part of our trouble. Nothing has been said here so far about the The appendix to the government report, particularly when studied in the light of such jurists as Dr. Henscius of Berlin, Dr. Mentha of Zurich, and Fraye and Gode of Paris, and others, will be helpful in approaching our own legislative problems. In Germany and Switzerland especially, the problems of marriage and divorce law and our own problem of various and conflicting laws have been taken up and partly solved. Switzerland has a uniform divorce law, which is still under discussion, or has been within a year or two. Germany has had for a dozen years an imperial marriage law of singularly scientific structure. There is now some discussion of uniformity in divorce law, for the several states and even small cities of Germany are often under very different systems. Such are the nature of the comparatively simple and not difficult regulations, both for entering into and passing out of the relation established by marriage, that bigamies or other illegal relations in the guise of lawful marriage would seem almost impossible. It seems to be as easy in Germany, and some other European countries, to trace the records of a marriage from its beginning to its dissolution, either in death or divorce, as it is in this country to trace the legal status of real property in the States which most carefully guard their records of deeds. We find that now the marriage and divorce laws of Germany are treated in official or private works on Familienrecht, or Family Law, growing out of the recent tendency among writers to make Law the Science of Relations instead of the Science of Rights. My own thought, if I may again refer to it, has long led to the conclusion that our practical way in this country of taking up the various legal subjects in this general field one by one with the unconscious yet strong social pressure of the underlying common life would sooner or later bring us to see certain things and the real problem. Marriage and Divorce laws are vastly more than legal provisions of a mere modus vivendi, that is, the adjustment of certain individual relations growing out of sex, which can be satisfactorily treated as affairs solely of individual and public concern. There are three instead of two elements in the problem. They are parts of a scientific whole, the Law of the Family. These laws regulate the initiation of individuals into the Family, or rather the initiation of the Family itself into being, and provide for its natural or abnormal dissolution, and are thus organically connected with other parts of this class of law in the common whole. In this way, we come inductively from a scientific point of view and practically, and therefore wisely in a political sense, to this great problem. Men of all parties in Congress and in the executive branches of our general government have united in securing this investigation. The way is now fairly open for that study which the subject demands, with a clear field before us in national legislation, if that should be found necessary, or for action by States should this be found to be the better way. There is no reason, happily, to think the present administration will be any less hospitable to the subject in its present stage that the last has been to the investigation and the territorial problem, though that could only wait for the approaches to the latter to be fairly opened by the investigation we now have accomplished. AUBURNDALE, MASS. Samuel W. Dike. NOTES FROM ENGLAND. DURING the months of December and January every district of England and Wales was put into a greater or less state of excitement by the election of councilors for the new County Councils. These elections were the first direct outcome of the Local Government Act passed last year by our Imperial Parliament. The change thus ushered in is not a great one on the surface, but it may possibly prove to have ulterior consequences of very great moment. Hitherto the local government of the rural districts has been managed by committees of the magistrates, mostly wealthy country gentlemen, of course unpaid, and appointed by the government, mostly from considerations of their social status and property qualifications. Henceforward most of the local matters, notably care of the roads, carrying out the sanitary laws, arranging the assessment upon which the local rates will be levied, care of lunatic asylums, besides many other matters, are to be intrusted to the new County Councils, which are popularly chosen bodies, elected triennially. Throughout England and Wales, therefore, these councils have been elected for the first time, and there has consequently been something of the excitement of a general election, except in a certain number of large towns, which, being already incorporated, have been constituted separate counties under this act, and in which the town council becomes the county council, and will perform those further duties which, as a county council, it has imposed upon it under these acts. The result of these elections, therefore, has been to constitute popular bodies in the counties of England and Wales, which will manage many local affairs, which, though of great importance to the people, have previously been under no popular control. The most important of the County Councils thus constituted is undoubtedly the London County Council: for the capital of the British Empire is by this Act of Parliament constituted a county, and has had, for the first time, given to it direct popular control of its own municipal affairs. The local affairs of the metropolis have been previously managed by the City Council (in the small part of London comprised by the city proper), by the local Vestries (for the minor affairs in the different localities), and by the Metropolitan Board of Works (for the larger works, for example, sewers and public parks). The Metropolitan Board of Works, composed VOL. XI. - NO. 64. 28 of representatives from the various vestries, has done some good work, but it has never been a popular body in any sense, and when last year revelations of extensive jobbery by officials of that body were made, its unpopularity seemed justified, and it was doomed; so, in its place, the new London County Council is to carry out the municipal work of the metropolis. The election of councilors in London has resulted in the most remarkable success of the Liberal party of course in many cases the elections did not turn on party lines, but in the majority of cases they did, and it has been a surprise that London, which is considered the stronghold of Conservative principles, should have returned a large majority of Liberal County Councilors. Whether this is to be taken as a sign of reviving Liberalism in the capital, or is due to the dislike of the now dying Metropolitan Board of Works, a strongly Conservative body, or to what causes it is attributable, it is hard to say, but the fact remains that the London County Council is a body in which Radical Reformers have a large working majority. The duties of the County Council are primarily those duties about which political differences have not much to say. But in time these new councils will have their powers largely extended, and their political differences will be much more important. The licensing of places for the sale of intoxicating liquors, for instance, which the bill in its original form made a duty of the County Council, but which was eventually left in the hands of the magistrates, must, sooner or later, be subject to their control, and the political interest will then be much more excited, and the publican and temperance candidates will be prominent. So, also, with the problem, serious in all our large towns, most serious in London, the provision of adequate dwellings for the working classes, with this the County Councils at present can only cope by enforcing the existing sanitary laws. Many feel, however, that something much more vigorous than the present law is needed to do away with the "slums" and cellar dwellings, the garrets and dens of "outcast London." Accordingly a bill will be introduced into Parliament immediately, giving the London County Council power to buy up land in London at a valuation price, without otherwise compensating the present owners for disturbance, and to erect thereon dwellings for the working classes. If this bill passes into law, there is little doubt that the London County Council will act on its powers, and will inaugurate a new era of social reform. This proposal to erect dwellings for the poorer classes by compulsorily buying out the rich owners and levying a tax over all ground values in London, to bear the expense, is a proposal which would have greatly shocked our old economists of the laissez-faire school, and which smacks terribly of Socialism. This, indeed, cannot be denied that the proposals of the Liberal party become more and more socialistic as years roll on; at the same time, the party of avowed Socialists is making great strides, and signs are not wanting that erelong the Socialists will be strong enough to make themselves an important factor in all popular elections. The London School Board has two very prominent Socialist members, one of whom, Mrs. Annie Besant, a Secularist lecturer, and a well-known philanthropist, was head of the poll in the great East-End Division; the Socialist candidate at the late Bristol School Board election was triumphantly returned, and at the Newcastle-on-Tyne School Board election three Socialist candidates were returned, the whole Board being. only fifteen in number. In the London County Council election no success was more notable than that of John Burns the Socialist, who, just a year ago, was suffering imprisonment for endeavoring to deliver a speech in Trafalgar Square, and now heads the poll in the Battersea division. Ten years ago the notion that an avowed Socialist could ever succeed at any popular election would have been absurd: now there is nothing strange in it: what ten years hence will see, it is hard to tell. This consideration is, in any case, reassuring, that the Socialism which is now making such rapid strides is perfectly open and avowed; it is not, as often on the Continent of Europe, driven underground by laws which limit the freedom of the press and of public utterance; besides, it is, as a rule, entirely constitutional in its means and aims, and strives for no sudden or violent subversion of the existing social order. These are the encouraging points about our most advanced politicians; and these considerations allow the hope that our future political and social development, which cannot but be a matter of many struggles and much difficulty, will still be an orderly and regular march of progress. In the ecclesiastical world, also, the air is full of interest and expectation. The Bishop of Lincoln has been summoned before the Archbishop of Canterbury's Court to answer the charges preferred against him of ritualistic practices which are contrary to the discipline of the Anglican Church. The Bishop of Lincoln is the most eminent and avowed exponent of the extreme High Church party on the episcopal bench. The Low Church section of the Church of England, whose whole instincts are Calvinistic, and whose watchword is "Protestantism," have endeavored to bring matters to an issue by citing for illegal practices the episcopal champion of that other party in the State Church, whose whole instincts are Catholic, and whose public services are scarcely distinguishable from those of the Roman Catholic Church. The ritualistic practices charged against the Bishop of Lincoln have been already condemned by our highest ecclesiastical court, and include the use of altar lights, of the mixed chalice, and of the eastward position, causing the "Agnus Dei" to be sung immediately after the prayer of consecration, and ceremonially cleansing the paten and chalice. That the Bishop has done what is charged against him is not denied. He and his party seem to take now the same ground which the ritualistic clergy have always taken, that is, denying the authority of the ecclesiastical courts, they claim that the Church must be independent of the State in all things spiritual. The trial before the Archbishop's Court, which opened on the 12th of February, now stands adjourned till the 12th of March; it may be all over by the time these lines are in print, or we may be for months plunged into a sea of legal and ecclesiastical squabble: some even think that the matter can hardly end without severing the weak bond which binds in one communion the two sections of the Church of England. Under the circumstances any one who is not a partisan in the quarrel can hardly fail to be moved by two opposite feelings. On the one hand, it is hard not to feel indignant at a matter of ritual and vestments, "a question of old clothes," as Dean Stanley once put it, being allowed to divert the Church from its work of uniting all men in Christian brotherhood, of converting the sinner, and of healing the sick one cannot fail to feel with those who ask, "Are they who find good in these symbols |