'The difficulty,' he continues, 'is to make English people face such a problem. They want to live under discipline more than any other nation in the world. They won't look ahead, especially the governing people. And you must have philosophy, though it is more than you can hope to get English people to admit the bare name of philosophy into their discussion of such a question. Again and again, notably in their criticism of America, you see how English people will persist in regarding any new trait as a sign of disease. Yet it is a sign of health.'
It will be seen that Mr Meredith puts forward the ten-year limit merely as a suggestion. I recall in one of Stevenson's essays an allusion to a lady who said: 'After ten years one's husband is at least an old friend,' and her answer was: 'Yes, and one would like him to be that and nothing more.' The decade seems to have a special significance in marriage. After the trying first year is over, most couples settle down comfortably enough until nearing the tenth year. The president of the Divorce Court has called this the danger zone of married life. One of the subsequent letters in _The Daily Mail_, approving Mr Meredith's suggestion, alluded to the present form of marriage as 'the life-sentence,' and suggested a still shorter time limit, five years for choice, since during that time a couple would have found happiness or the reverse, and in the latter case ten years was too long to wait for freedom.
A writer in another paper cited America as an example of terminable marriage in full working order. 'It appears from the statement of an American bishop that the people of the United States are actually living under Mr Meredith's conditions already. Last year (1903) as many as 600,000 American marriages were dissolved. This means that there was one divorce to every four marriages. In some districts the proportion was more like one to two. And the most frequent cause of divorce was a desire for change!'
It seems to me that the establishment of a leasehold marriage system would only result in wholesale wretchedness and confusion, beside which the present sum of marital misery would be but a drop in the ocean. If our marriage laws must be modified, let us trust it will not be in this direction, though it is obvious enough that such a change would come as a boon to thousands of men and women, who from one cause or another have come to loathe the tie that binds them. Whether it would not also disturb the prosaic content that passes for happiness with millions more is too big a question to be more than mentioned here.