seventy-one sittings. A minority report was signed by the Archbishop of York and two others. The women signed the majority report.

This report of the majority sweeps aside the traditional English theory that marriage is solely a religious covenant and adopts whole-heartedly the view that marriage is a legal contract so far as the parties to it are concerned and a social covenant so far as Society is concerned. Applying this view, it recommends a wide extension of the grounds of divorce to accommodate the marriage relation to the known human tendencies that affect personal morals and the public good. These grounds are as follows:

(1) Adultery.

(2) Desertion for three years and upward. (3) Cruelty.

(4) Incurable insanity, after five years' confinement.

(5) Habitual drunkenness, found incurable after three years from a first order of separation. (6) Imprisonment under a commuted death.

sentence.

It is an old injustice of the English law that it requires all complainants in divorce causes to present their case before a court in London. This law has made divorce an impossibility to the poor and to most persons of ordinary income whose residence was outside London; and the denial of divorce under many common conditions has undoubtedly tended to lower the standard of public morals. One recommendation of the Commission is that divorce courts be held in all parts of the country to hear cases in which the joint income of the husband and wife does not exceed $1,500 and their property does not exceed $1,000 in value.

The Commission unanimously recommends that these courts be empowered to declare marriages null for the following

reasons:

(1) Unsound mind.

for divorce and of grounds for nullifying marriage, are probably as good a statement as can be made of the most enlightened modern opinion. They recognize the limitations of human nature and would probably encourage morality. It is interesting to note that the majority report proceeds upon the assumption that to promote morality and to conserve human happiness was the Commission's primary duty.

Another unanimous recommendation of the Commission is that restrictions be placed upon the publication of reports of divorce cases, even to a permanent prohibition of publication of portions of the evidence at the discretion of the judge; that no newspaper accounts of the proceedings be permitted until after the case is closed; and that the printing of pictures of the parties to a divorce suit be prohibited.

A study of the Commission's report is useful for this reason: it might well form a basis for the propaganda of those social reformers who propose a uniform divorce law for the United States. The recommendations are a rational mean between the conservatism of the laws of New York and of the laxity of the laws of Nevada; and public opinion could probably be united in all the states upon a programme so sane and moderate as this.

Of course, this sentence was published in good faith and wholly without malice. Its publication was incidental to a description of the various purposes of which the dictograph had been utilized. The editors of the WORLD'S WORK now learn that this statement was not correct They greatly regret that this injustice has been done to Mr. Knotts, and gladly make amends by (5) Wilful refusal to perform the duties of publishing this correction of the unfortumarriage. nate error, in the same conspicuous way in These recommendations, both of grounds which the original statement was published.

(2) Epilepsy and recurrent insanity. (3) Specific disease.

(4) When a woman is in a condition which renders marriage a fraud upon the husband.

THE NEW FREEDOM

A CALL FOR THE EMANCIPATION OF THE GENEROUS
ENERGIES OF A PEOPLE

T

BY

WOODROW WILSON

I

THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH

HERE is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that are discussed on the political platform at the present moment. That singular fact is that nothing is done in this country as it was done twenty years ago.

We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past. The life of America is not the life that it was twenty years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago. We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our life. The old political formulas do not fit the present problems; they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age. The older cries sound as if they belonged to a past age which men have almost forgotten. Things which used to be put into the party platforms of ten years ago would sound antiquated if put into a platform now. We are facing the necessity of fitting a new social organization, as we did once fit the old organization, to the happiness and prosperity of the great body of citizens; for we are conscious that the new order of society has not been made to fit and provide the convenience or prosperity of the average man. The life of the nation has grown infinitely varied. It does not centre now upon questions of governmental structure or of the distribution of governmental powers. It centres upon questions of the very structure and operation of society itself, of which government is only the instrument. Our development has run so fast and so far along the line sketched in the earlier day of constitutional definition, has so crossed and interlaced those lines, has piled upon them

such novel structures of trust and combination, has elaborated within them a life so manifold, so full of forces which transcend the boundaries of the country itself and fill the eyes of the world, that a new nation seems to have been created which the old formulas do not fit or afford a vital interpretation of.

We have come upon a very different age from any that preceded us. We have come upon an age when we do not do business in the way in which we used to do business when we do not carry on any of the operations of manufacture, sale, transportation, or communication as men used to carry them on. There is a sense in which in our day the individual has been submerged. In most parts of our country men work for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but as employees-in a higher or lower grade-of great corporations. There was a time when corporations played a very minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.

You know what happens when you are the servant of a corporation. You have in no instance access to the men who are really determining the policy of the corporation. If the corporation is doing the things that it ought not to do, you really have no voice in the matter and must obey the orders, and you have with deep mortification to cooperate in the doing of things which you know are against the public interest. Your individuality is swallowed up in the individuality and purpose of a great organization.

It is true that, while most men are thus submerged in the corporation, a few, a very few, are exalted to power which as individuals they could never have wielded. Through the great organizations of which they are the heads, a few are enabled to play a part unprecedented by anything in history in the control of the business operations of the country and in the determination of the happiness of great numbers of people.

Yesterday, and ever since history began, men were related to one another as individuals. To be sure there were the family, the Church, and the State, institutions which associated men in certain limited circles of relationships. But in the ordinary concerns of life, in the ordinary work, in the daily round, men dealt freely and directly with one another. To-day, the everyday relationships of men are largely with great impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with other individual men.

Now this is nothing short of a new social age, a new era of human relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life.

In this new age we find, for instance, that our laws with regard to the relations of employer and employee are in many respects wholly antiquated and impossible. They were framed for another age, which nobody now living remembers, which is, indeed, so remote from our life that it would be difficult for many of us to understand it if it were described to us. The employer is now generally a corporation or a huge company of some kind; the employee is one of hundreds or of thousands brought together, not by individual masters whom they know and with whom they have personal relations, but by agents of one sort or another. Workingmen are marshaled in great numbers for the performance of a multitude of particular tasks under a common discipline. They generally use dangerous and powerful machinery, over whose repair and renewal they have no control. New rules must be devised with regard to their obligations and their rights, their obligations to their employers and their responsibilities to one another. New rules must be devised for their protection, for their compensation when injured, for their support when disabled.

There is something very new and very big and very complex about these new relations of capital and labor. A new economic society has sprung up, and we must effect a new set of adjustments. We must not pit power against weakness. The employer is generally, in our day, as I have said, not an individua!, but a powerful group; and yet the workingman when dealing with his employer is still, under our existing law, an individual.

Why is it that we have a labor question at all? It is for the simple and very sufficient reason that the laboring man and the employer are not intimate associates now, as they used to be in time past. Most of our laws were formed in the age when employer and employees knew each other, knew each other's characters, were associates with each other, dealt with each other as man with man. That is no longer the case. You not only do not come into personal contact with the men who have the supreme command in those corporations, but it would be out of the question for you to do it. Our modern corporations employ thousands, and in some instances hundreds of thousands, of men. The only persons whom you see or deal with are local superintendents or local representatives of a vast organization, which is not like anything that the workingmen of the time in which our laws were framed knew anything about. A little group of workingmen, seeing their employer every day, dealing with him in a personal way, is one thing, and the modern body of labor engaged as employees of the huge enterprises that spread all over the country, dealing with men of