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THE UNIFORM DIVORCE ACT AND
study of the facts deserve attentive consideration :
SCIENCE HE Uniform Divorce Act approved by the Commissioners on Uni form State Laws has not made such progress as some of the other uniform acts, having been adopted by only two or three of the states, but we do not believe that this is because of any serious inherent defects in the act, the merits of which, especially as regards
uniformity in the matter of jurisdiction, will doubtless come more and more
to be appreciated. We print elsewhere a strong plea
from the pen of one of the Commissioners for the adoption of the act as a piece of restrictive legislation. Mr. Roosevelt in a special message to Congress in 1905 referred to a widespread popular con viction that divorce laws were danger ously lax and indifferently administered,
and the Committee on Resolutions of the Congresson Uniform Divorce Laws in 1906 spoke of the “many evils en gendered by the lax and unphilosophic system prevailing in many of the states." A recent writer has investigated this assumed influence of divorce legislation
on the increased divorce rate in the March issue of the Michigan Law Review. From an analysis of statistics
We have found changes in the law which ought to produce marked efiects in the in crease or decrease of the number of divorce decrees; the results of these changes we find to be extremely slight or else entirely lacking. . . . The fact of the matter is that divorce has become a problem far beyond any con trol by mere legislation, and those who hope to remedy the evil, as they call it, by the adop tion of a model divorce code, seem doomed
to disappointment. At least there is no great hope held out by the results of such statutory changes as have already been tried. The tide of divorce has gone on, steadily increasing in spite of the increase of legal restrictions, and the question is now certainly an ominous one. But it is doubtful if it is a question that can be met and settled by the legislator, unless he tries to settle it in some way difierent from his well-worn attempts at regulating the evil has been done. Perhaps the sociologists should be listened to, who say that the way to prevent the evil of divorce is to regulate marriage rather than divorce.
The impression in certain quarters that the Uniform Divorce Act is in tended to restrict the rate of divorces is perhaps partly due to the fact that the National Congress on Uniform Divorce Laws included among its dele gates not only members of the bench
and bar and prominent public officials, but
representatives
of the
churches
gathered from typical states Mr. Evans Holbrook concludes that this influence
as well, and partly to such expressions of
is not all what it is frequently believed
as the declaration that a reduction in the number of grounds for divorce was more to be desired than an increase. The general attitude exhibited in the
to be, even if it is to be seriously con sidered at all, and his carefully drawn
conclusions derived from an impartial
the Committee on Marriage and Divorce
