When such enactments of law-givers tend against those impulses which spring from the roots of human feeling, taking into consideration the happiness of the few and not the good of the many, they are bad medicines for the world. The instant, quick release by divorce from all troubles, great and small, between man and wife, is no better than that other instant, quick relief from bodily pain, which is morphia, a material danger no longer at all dim or shadowy.
We are a cowardly generation, and men shrink from suffering now, as their fathers shrank from dishonour in rougher times. The Lotus hangs within the reach of all, and in the lives of many "it is always afternoon," as for the Lotus Eaters. The fruit takes many shapes and names; it is called Divorce, it is called Morphia, it is called Compromise, it is designated in a thousand ways and justified by ten thousand specious arguments, but it means only one thing: Escape from Pain.
Soft-hearted and weak-nerved people ask why humanity should suffer at all, and they hail every invention, moral or material, which can make life easier for the moment, as a heaven-sent blessing. Why should we be uncomfortable, even an hour, when a little dose of poison can create a lazy oblivion? That is the drunkard’s reasoning, the opium-eater’s defence, the invalid’s excuse. It is no argument for men who call themselves the world’s masters.
Civilization and Progress are not the same thing. We have too much progress and too little civilization nowadays. Progress is omnivorous, eager after new things, seeking above all to save trouble and get money. Civilization is eclectic, slow, painstaking, wise, willing to buy good at the price it is worth. Civilization gave us marriage, in respecting which we are above animals. Progress is giving us divorce, wholesale, cheap, immoral, a degradation beneath that of those primitive peoples, who make no promises and break none, who do not set up right as a fashion and wrong as a practice, the truth for the ensign and the lie for the course.
Helen Harmon’s existence turned out happily in the end. She was fortunate at last, before the love of life was gone. But for the accident of her husband’s sudden death, she would have had to face her cruel difficulties to death’s solution; and with her character she would not have been defeated, for she had on her side the accumulated force of all womanliness against the individual evil that was her familiar enemy. Far should it be from the story-teller to draw a moral; furthest of all, that false moral that makes faith and truth and courage get worldly pay for their services--servants to be hired as guides and porters to happiness. In Helen’s case it chanced that she got what she wanted. Fate had spent its force against her, and peace was with her thereafter.
