marriage vows be forever tied to one who disregards and violates every obligation which it imposes; to one with whom it is impossible to cohabit; to one whose touch is contamination. Nor does it demand that such injured party, if legally free, should be forever debarred from forming other ties through which the lost hopes of happiness for life may be restored. It is not reason, and it cannot be law, divine or moral, that unfaithfulness, or wilful and obstinate desertion, or persistent cruelty of the stronger party, should afford no grounds for relief. The most rigid creeds, to the contrary, have found methods of dispensation from the theoretical rule. And if no redress be legalized, the law itself will be set at defiance, and greater injury to soul and body will result from clandestine methods of relief. Yet so desirable is the indissolubility of marriage as an institution, so necessary is it to the happiness of families and the good of society, so pitiable the consequences that often flow from a dissolution, that every discouragement to such a remedy should be interposed. Not only should the Judge take every care to see that just cause exists, but that no other remedy is possible. No jugglery or privacy should be tolerated, however high in station the parties may be. Investigation of the truth should be thorough and open, and should be a matter of public concern, participated in by the public representative of the law. It should be regarded as a quasi-criminal process, if not accompanied with criminal sanctions. Only serious and even severe methods of administering the law will be sufficient to repress the growing tendency of discontented parties to rush into divorce courts.

RUTGERS' ALUMNI DINNER.

LETTER OF “REGRET" SENT BY JOSEPH P. BRADLEY, DATED WASHINGTON, FEBRUARY 26, 1891.

L. LAFLIN Kellogg, Esq.,

DEAR SIR-I am sorry that I cannot be present to-morrow evening to join our alumni at their annual dinner, and to answer personally to the toast of “The Bench." I can only say in this circumscribed way, that "The Bench" of the forum is quite as uneasy and anxious a seat as "The Bench" of the country schoolhouse, or the old stone college, without the opportunity of cutting your name on it with a jackknife. That must be done with a different weapon. How deeply we all sympathize with each other on looking back, with a sigh, to those happy days when the only care was to con a lesson well, or to make a creditable recitation; and yet, as the boy is father to the man, so the college is mother-alma mater-to every branch of professional life, looked back to, looked up to as the source of all that is good or excellent in years of riper development. But the standards of attainment and approbation, how different! It is not now a question of Greek roots, or mathematical abstractions, with anxious desire to win a professor's smile; it is a question of honest duty performed in the hard struggles of life; of wisdom daily acquired; of "increasing in favor with God and man," each of us squaring his life, or trying to do so, by some standard appropriate to his calling; the merchant, by probity and diligence in business; the physician, by the most advanced

analysis of human ills and their remedies; the divine, by the lofty ideals of sacred literature and the moral manifestations of modern society; the lawyer, by studying the fountains of jurisprudence, as applied to the phases of every-day business; the jurist, by the lights of truth and justice, from whatever source derived, and all with a watchful world for spectators and audience and judges.

Before us, on the Bench, stands the awful Goddess of Justice and Law, watching every word and weigh. ing every decision; if we make a mistake, sending a chill through every vein; if we decide right, rewarding us only with a kindly nod of approval, but leaving us to incur small thanks, and often deep curses, from those whose cases we are called upon to determine. And, how fearful is the abiding consciousness, that, however just our decisions may be, wretchedness, poverty, ruin on one side or the other, may hang on our words. Rejoice, fellow Alumni, for your freedom from such trials. Your pursuits do not necessarily involve, as our functions often do, the ruin of fortunes and the destruction of all hope in the world.

So the Bench greets you with the wish that you may never have occasion to approach it, except as idle and disinterested spectators, or with an invitation to another "Alumni" dinner.

Let me give you something new and fresh: "Sol ustitiae et occidentem illustra."

EQUALITY.

"We hold it to be self-evident that all men are created equal." This is our creed as a nation. But the question of importance is, in what respect equal? Not equal in mind, for this experience teaches us to be untrue. Not equal in compared vigor, for this is contrary also to experience. Not equal in the dispensations of Providence, nor equally favored by fortune. In fine, there is scarcely one thing in which we may be said to be equal. In what sense is it, then, that we are declared to be equal by the Declaration of Independence? The answer must be, politically equal. But again, wherein does this political equality consist? Does it consist in the distribution of wealth, and a common possession of the comforts and elegancies of life? Certainly not; or else the great apostles of our liberty; our Washington, our Franklin, our Adams, our Jefferson, were traitors to their creed, and selfishly dismissed from their intentions the design of realizing the great doctrines which they so solemnly avowed. Besides, it cannot be in this sense that they meant; for in this sense it would be nonsense and vanity. The luxuries of life do not consist merely in dollars and cents. These, it is true, might be distributed with a comparative ease amongst the expectant throng. But there are your music, your paintings, your other trophies of art; there are your stores of literature, your black letter, your dead letter, your antiquities, your offsprings of the muse, there are your refined emotions, your generous feeling, your whole aspirations-all these, and ten thousand more are real, bonafide luxuries, that not only occupy, but enchant

hundreds and thousands who are susceptible of what they are calculated to inspire. Now, if one class of luxuries may be possessed in common, there is no reason why every class may not be-as, if we are all created equal, it were unjust that any should have at their command sources of delight which are denied to the rest. But there are many species of luxury, those in particular which I enumerated, which the great mass of mankind are incapable of enjoying, and of which they ever would be incapable, how equably soever the grosser attendants of prosperity might be distributed. Hence an equalization of wealth would not be followed by an equal power of enjoying life (which is the object of wealth), and the very object proposed would never be attained. Further, a dull equalization of wealth would smother enterprise, produce listlessness, and induce a man, instead of aiming to support himself by his own exertions, to depend for his support upon the rest, conscious always that however indolent and inactive himself might be, he would still share an equal portion with his fellows-with even the most industrious of them; for any attempt to punish inactivity by subjecting it to want, would be an admission of the principle that industry should be rewarded, and this is the great principle that supports the present machinery of society. Leaving then the notion that community of wealth is meant by the equality alluded to in the Declaration, what else, may we ask, can it mean? Does it mean social eqality? Such a state would make all the classes (I do not say orders) of society commingle their intercourse; would introduce the cobbler into the most elegant drawing