Foreign News: For Better, for Worse

“I believe,” a young London mother told a meeting of 3,600 other British mothers last week, “that there is a great fear in our generation of being labeled priggish. In consequence, people are sometimes afraid to show disapproval of what they know to be wrong . . .”

Alarmed at statistics that showed one divorce for every eight marriages in Britain* last year, the courageous speaker, Britain’s Princess Elizabeth, went further; than either royal personages or most 23-year-olds are wont to do in speaking her mind. “We live in an age of growing self-indulgence,” she warned her Mothers’ Union audience, which included a turbaned matron from Lagos, “of hardening materialism and of falling moral standards . . . When we see around us the havoc which has been wrought, above all among the children, by the breakup of homes, we can have no doubt that divorce and separation are responsible for some of the darkest evils in our society today.

“I do not think you can perform any finer service than to help maintain the Christian doctrine that the relationship of husband and wife is a permanent one, not to be lightly broken because of difficulties or quarrels.

“A child learns by example . . . We surely cannot expect our children to do what we are too lazy and too indifferent to do ourselves.”

*U.S. rate: one divorce in about four marriages.