themselves, to rush into the divorce courts, causing Marriage to be so degraded and lightly regarded, that it was termed, in derision, the "Sacrament of Adultery"!

These and other causes have combined to multiply the evils of divorce until the country stands aghast before the appalling total of ruined and blighted American homes. Some of the clergy are making an effort to check divorce by refusing to perform the marriage-rites for divorced persons, and thus affixing the stigma of church and social ostracism upon such unions, but to little effect, since other clergy are easily found who will perform such rites.

A National Divorce Law is now being widely urged. Recognizing the practical impossibility of securing the adoption of uniform divorce laws by the forty-eight States, it is proposed to take measures to obtain the necessary authorization from the States for the Congress of the United States to enact a general federal statute, which shall fix the grounds upon which marriage may be dissolved, and take the place of the conflicting, demoralizing mass of State laws upon the subject, which have, indeed, been responsible for much of the evil, by affording to every one, at all times, the means of evading the restrictions of one State, by the simple process of seeking relief in some other State, with looser divorce laws, and afterwards returning to live and marry in the former State, which is obliged to recognize the legality of the proceedings of "another sovereign State."

Alone among the nations of the Earth, where all the others recognize but one uniform code of divorce in their organic law, the United States have attempted to regulate the dissolution of the most important of human relations, by FORTY-EIGHT discordant, independent codes

of divorce-still worse confounded by the conflicting decisions of a greater number of divorce courts, in those 48 States, than exist in all the other nations combined!

For the entire Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, there is but one court possessing jurisdiction to grant divorces, and it is not over-burdened with its task.

France possesses seventy-nine such courts.

In the United States there are now more than Three Thousand courts authorized to grant divorces, or, one for every one of the 3,000 counties in the country!

The State of New Jersey alone has taken the praiseworthy step of limiting to one high court, composed of chancellors, the power of granting divorces and with splendid results in decreasing them, despite the fact that an easily abused law of desertion still exists there.

A similar measure in other States, limiting the number of courts with such jurisdiction to one, or several, if absolutely required by area and population, and composed as in New Jersey, could not fail to have the most salutary results everywhere, not merely in the lessening of the evil, but in exposing and eliminating, under such careful and intelligent sifting of the evidence, almost all the suits upon false pretenses.

And if we would imitate the eminently wise, and practical requirement of the Code Napoleon (to which reference has been made) of obliging the applicants for divorce to present their petitions in person, instead of by attorney, and hear the efforts at conciliation by a disinterested judge of high position, rather than the interested advice of a divorce-attorney, it cannot be doubted that great good would follow.

Causes of divorce in the various States range from "no divorce for any cause," in South Carolina, to as

many as FOURTEEN in the State of New Hampshire, with the sinister result that about 75 per cent. of the divorces in that highly educated, enlightened commonwealth are granted to women.

The disastrous operation upon the minds and consciences of women themselves, of that strange legal fiction in American State courts of "equal guilt," in the offence of Adultery, has now grown to such proportions, that it even threatens the ultimate displacement of American Womanhood from the ancient pedestal of honorable Marriage to the degradation of so-called marriage relations, so disgracefully loose and easy to throw off, as to be not much above a species of legalized concubinage! -And the insensate folly of the New Woman in attacking and seeking to destroy binding honorable Marriage, as she is doing, insuring her own shame and degradation, by being thus lightly passed from hand to hand, for temporary use, can be likened only to the madness of Armida setting fire to her own palace!

THE LEGION OF HONOUR

This noblest of all monuments of distinction to personal merit, which has proved so lasting in its inspiration to every elevated sentiment of the human mind, was erected by the First Consul upon the ruins of hereditary rank and privilege in France, even while the shocks of Revolutionary convulsions were still felt and dreaded.

The proposal for its institution instantly aroused a strong opposition. It was charged by its enemies that there was a double motive in the purpose of its creationone declared, and the other hidden, beneath a specious guise, to mask ambitious designs to overturn the Republic, and, by the aid of such an order, re-establish the throne with Bonaparte as its occupant.

It required all the power, all the boldness and skill of the new government to venture, at such a time, upon a measure which appeared to so many ardent and determined Republicans as the first step towards a counterrevolution.

But the First Consul already possessed a profound knowledge of the French character, and his first care. was to awaken, in its most stirring form, in the all-toosusceptible hearts of Frenchmen, that sentiment of glory, by which he led the men of that day, by conferring some outward, visible mark of honour for heroic actions in battle. As a preliminary test, to pave the way for the more serious measure of the Legion of Honour, the