WHY STATESMEN SHIRK THE MARRIAGE QUESTION

The reform of marriage, then, will be a very splendid and very
hazardous adventure for the Prime Minister who takes it in hand.
He will be posted on every hoarding and denounced in every
Opposition paper, especially in the sporting papers, as the
destroyer of the home, the family, of decency, of morality, of
chastity and what not. All the commonplaces of the modern
anti-Socialist Noodle's Oration will be hurled at him. And he will
have to proceed without the slightest concession to it, giving the
noodles nothing but their due in the assurance "I know how to
attain our ends better than you," and staking his political life
on the conviction carried by that assurance, which conviction will
depend a good deal on the certainty with which it is made, which
again can be attained only by studying the facts of marriage and
understanding the needs of the nation. And, after all, he will
find that the pious commonplaces on which he and the electorate
are agreed conceal an utter difference in the real ends in view:
his being public, far-sighted, and impersonal, and those of
multitudes of the electorate narrow, personal, jealous, and
corrupt. Under such circumstances, it is not to be wondered at
that the mere mention of the marriage question makes a British
Cabinet shiver with apprehension and hastily pass on to safer
business. Nevertheless the reform of marriage cannot be put off
for ever. When its hour comes, what are the points the Cabinet
will have to take up?


THE QUESTION OF POPULATION

First, it will have to make up its mind as to how many people we
want in the country. If we want less than at present, we must
ascertain how many less; and if we allow the reduction to be made
by the continued operation of the present sterilization of
marriage, we must settle how the process is to be stopped when it
has gone far enough. But if we desire to maintain the population
at its present figure, or to increase it, we must take immediate
steps to induce people of moderate means to marry earlier and to
have more children. There is less urgency in the case of the very
poor and the very rich. They breed recklessly: the rich because
they can afford it, and the poor because they cannot afford the
precautions by which the artisans and the middle classes avoid
big families. Nevertheless the population declines, because the
high birth rate of the very poor is counterbalanced by a huge
infantile-mortality in the slums, whilst the very rich are also
the very few, and are becoming sterilized by the spreading revolt
of their women against excessive childbearing--sometimes against
any childbearing.

This last cause is important. It cannot be removed by any economic
readjustment. If every family were provided with 10,000 pounds a
year tomorrow, women would still refuse more and more to continue
bearing children until they are exhausted whilst numbers of others
are bearing no children at all. Even if every woman bearing and
rearing a valuable child received a handsome series of payments,
thereby making motherhood a real profession as it ought to be, the
number of women able or willing to give more of their lives to
gestation and nursing than three or four children would cost them
might not be very large if the advance in social organization and
conscience indicated by such payments involved also the opening up
of other means of livelihood to women. And it must be remembered
that urban civilization itself, insofar as it is a method of
evolution (and when it is not this, it is simply a nuisance), is a
sterilizing process as far as numbers go. It is harder to keep up
the supply of elephants than of sparrows and rabbits; and for the
same reason it will be harder to keep up the supply of highly
cultivated men and women than it now is of agricultural laborers.
Bees get out of this difficulty by a special system of feeding
which enables a queen bee to produce 4,000 eggs a day whilst the
other females lose their sex altogether and become workers
supporting the males in luxury and idleness until the queen has
found her mate, when the queen kills him and the quondam females
kill all the rest (such at least are the accounts given by
romantic naturalists of the matter).


THE RIGHT TO MOTHERHOOD

This system certainly shews a much higher development of social
intelligence than our marriage system; but if it were physically
possible to introduce it into human society it would be wrecked by
an opposite and not less important revolt of women: that is, the
revolt against compulsory barrenness. In this two classes of women
are concerned: those who, though they have no desire for the
presence or care of children, nevertheless feel that motherhood is
an experience necessary to their complete psychical development
and understanding of themselves and others, and those who, though
unable to find or unwilling to entertain a husband, would like to
occupy themselves with the rearing of children. My own experience
of discussing this question leads me to believe that the one point
on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the
existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the
obligation to become the servant of a man. Adoption, or the
begging or buying or stealing of another woman's child, is no
remedy: it does not provide the supreme experience of bearing the
child. No political constitution will ever succeed or deserve to
succeed unless it includes the recognition of an absolute right to
sexual experience, and is untainted by the Pauline or romantic
view of such experience as sinful in itself. And since this
experience in its fullest sense must be carried in the case of
women to the point of childbearing, it can only be reconciled with
the acceptance of marriage with the child's father by legalizing
polygyny, because there are more adult women in the country than
men. Now though polygyny prevails throughout the greater part of
the British Empire, and is as practicable here as in India, there
is a good deal to be said against it, and still more to be felt.
However, let us put our feelings aside for a moment, and consider
the question politically.


MONOGAMY, POLYGYNY AND POLYANDRY

The number of wives permitted to a single husband or of husbands
to a single wife under a marriage system, is not an ethical
problem: it depends solely on the proportion of the sexes in the
population. If in consequence of a great war three-quarters of the
men in this country were killed, it would be absolutely necessary
to adopt the Mohammedan allowance of four wives to each man in
order to recruit the population. The fundamental reason for not
allowing women to risk their lives in battle and for giving them
the first chance of escape in all dangerous emergencies: in short,
for treating their lives as more valuable than male lives, is not
in the least a chivalrous reason, though men may consent to it
under the illusion of chivalry. It is a simple matter of
necessity; for if a large proportion of women were killed or
disabled, no possible readjustment of our marriage law could avert
the depopulation and consequent political ruin of the country,
because a woman with several husbands bears fewer children than a
woman with one, whereas a man can produce as many families as he
has wives. The natural foundation of the institution of monogamy
is not any inherent viciousness in polygyny or polyandry, but the
hard fact that men and women are born in about equal numbers.
Unfortunately, we kill so many of our male children in infancy
that we are left with a surplus of adult women which is
sufficiently large to claim attention, and yet not large enough to
enable every man to have two wives. Even if it were, we should be
met by an economic difficulty. A Kaffir is rich in proportion to
the number of his wives, because the women are the breadwinners.
But in our civilization women are not paid for their social work
in the bearing and rearing of children and the ordering of
households; they are quartered on the wages of their husbands. At
least four out of five of our men could not afford two wives
unless their wages were nearly doubled. Would it not then be well
to try unlimited polygyny; so that the remaining fifth could have
as many wives apiece as they could afford? Let us see how this
would work.


THE MALE REVOLT AGAINST POLYGYNY

Experience shews that women do not object to polygyny when it is
customary: on the contrary, they are its most ardent supporters.
The reason is obvious. The question, as it presents itself in
practice to a woman, is whether it is better to have, say, a whole
share in a tenth-rate man or a tenth share in a first-rate man.
Substitute the word Income for the word Man, and you will have the
question as it presents itself economically to the dependent
woman. The woman whose instincts are maternal, who desires
superior children more than anything else, never hesitates. She
would take a thousandth share, if necessary, in a husband who was
a man in a thousand, rather than have some comparatively weedy
weakling all to herself. It is the comparatively weedy weakling,
left mateless by polygyny, who objects. Thus, it was not the women
of Salt Lake City nor even of America who attacked Mormon
polygyny. It was the men. And very naturally. On the other hand,
women object to polyandry, because polyandry enables the best
women to monopolize all the men, just as polygyny enables the best
men to monopolize all the women. That is why all our ordinary men
and women are unanimous in defence of monogamy, the men because it
excludes polygyny, and the women because it excludes polyandry.
The women, left to themselves, would tolerate polygyny. The men,
left to themselves, would tolerate polyandry. But polygyny would
condemn a great many men, and polyandry a great many women, to the
celibacy of neglect. Hence the resistance any attempt to establish
unlimited polygyny always provokes, not from the best people, but
from the mediocrities and the inferiors. If we could get rid of
our inferiors and screw up our average quality until mediocrity
ceased to be a reproach, thus making every man reasonably eligible
as a father and every woman reasonably desirable as a mother,
polygyny and polyandry would immediately fall into sincere
disrepute, because monogamy is so much more convenient and
economical that nobody would want to share a husband or a wife if
he (or she) could have a sufficiently good one all to himself (or
herself). Thus it appears that it is the scarcity of husbands or
wives of high quality that leads woman to polygyny and men to
polyandry, and that if this scarcity were cured, monogamy, in the
sense of having only one husband or wife at a time (facilities for
changing are another matter), would be found satisfactory.


DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ORIENTAL AND OCCIDENTAL POLYGYNY

It may now be asked why the polygynist nations have not gravitated
to monogamy, like the latter-day saints of Salt Lake City. The
answer is not far to seek: their polygyny is limited. By the
Mohammedan law a man cannot marry more than four wives; and by the
unwritten law of necessity no man can keep more wives than
he can afford; so that a man with four wives must be quite as
exceptional in Asia as a man with a carriage-and-pair or a motor
car is in Europe, where, nevertheless we may all have as many
carriages and motors as we can afford to pay for. Kulin polygyny,
though unlimited, is not really a popular institution: if you are
a person of high caste you pay another person of very august caste
indeed to make your daughter momentarily one of his sixty or
seventy momentary wives for the sake of ennobling your
grandchildren; but this fashion of a small and intensely snobbish
class is negligible as a general precedent. In any case, men and
women in the East do not marry anyone they fancy, as in England
and America. Women are secluded and marriages are arranged. In
Salt Lake City the free unsecluded woman could see and meet the
ablest man of the community, and tempt him to make her his tenth
wife by all the arts peculiar to women in English-speaking
countries. No eastern woman can do anything of the sort. The man
alone has any initiative; but he has no access to the woman;
besides, as we have seen, the difficulty created by male license
is not polygyny but polyandry, which is not allowed.

Consequently, if we are to make polygyny a success, we must limit
it. If we have two women to every one man, we must allow each man
only two wives. That is simple; but unfortunately our own actual
proportion is, roughly, something like 1 1/11 woman to 1 man. Now
you cannot enact that each man shall be allowed 1 1/11 wives,
or that each woman who cannot get a husband all to herself shall
divide herself between eleven already married husbands. Thus there
is no way out for us through polygyny. There is no way at all out
of the present system of condemning the superfluous women to
barrenness, except by legitimizing the children of women who are
not married to the fathers.


THE OLD MAID'S RIGHT TO MOTHERHOOD

Now the right to bear children without taking a husband could not
be confined to women who are superfluous in the monogamic
reckoning. There is the practical difficulty that although in our
population there are about a million monogamically superfluous
women, yet it is quite impossible to say of any given unmarried
woman that she is one of the superfluous. And there is the
difficulty of principle. The right to bear a child, perhaps the
most sacred of all women's rights, is not one that should have any
conditions attached to it except in the interests of race welfare.
There are many women of admirable character, strong, capable,
independent, who dislike the domestic habits of men; have no
natural turn for mothering and coddling them; and find the
concession of conjugal rights to any person under any conditions
intolerable by their self-respect. Yet the general sense of the
community recognizes in these very women the fittest people to
have charge of children, and trusts them, as school mistresses and
matrons of institutions, more than women of any other type when it
is possible to procure them for such work. Why should the taking
of a husband be imposed on these women as the price of their right
to maternity? I am quite unable to answer that question. I see a
good deal of first-rate maternal ability and sagacity spending
itself on bees and poultry and village schools and cottage
hospitals; and I find myself repeatedly asking myself why this
valuable strain in the national breed should be sterilized.
Unfortunately, the very women whom we should tempt to become
mothers for the good of the race are the very last people to press
their services on their country in that way. Plato long ago
pointed out the importance of being governed by men with
sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public
duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing;
and yet we have taken his instruction so little to heart that we
are at present suffering acutely from government by gentlemen who
will stoop to all the mean shifts of electioneering and incur all
its heavy expenses for the sake of a seat in Parliament. But what
our sentimentalists have not yet been told is that exactly the
same thing applies to maternity as to government. The best mothers
are not those who are so enslaved by their primitive instincts
that they will bear children no matter how hard the conditions
are, but precisely those who place a very high price on their
services, and are quite prepared to become old maids if the price
is refused, and even to feel relieved at their escape. Our
democratic and matrimonial institutions may have their merits: at
all events they are mostly reforms of something worse; but they
put a premium on want of self-respect in certain very important
matters; and the consequence is that we are very badly governed
and are, on the whole, an ugly, mean, ill-bred race.


IBSEN'S CHAIN STITCH

Let us not forget, however, in our sympathy for the superfluous
women, that their children must have fathers as well as mothers.
Who are the fathers to be? All monogamists and married women will
reply hastily: either bachelors or widowers; and this solution
will serve as well as another; for it would be hypocritical to
pretend that the difficulty is a practical one. None the less,
the monogamists, after due reflection, will point out that if
there are widowers enough the superfluous women are not really
superfluous, and therefore there is no reason why the parties
should not marry respectably like other people. And they might in
that case be right if the reasons were purely numerical: that is,
if every woman were willing to take a husband if one could be
found for her, and every man willing to take a wife on the same
terms; also, please remember, if widows would remain celibate
to give the unmarried women a chance. These ifs will not work. We
must recognize two classes of old maids: one, the really
superfluous women, and the other, the women who refuse to accept
maternity on the (to them) unbearable condition of taking a
husband. From both classes may, perhaps, be subtracted for the
present the large proportion of women who could not afford the
extra expense of one or more children. I say "perhaps," because it
is by no means sure that within reasonable limits mothers do not
make a better fight for subsistence, and have not, on the whole, a
better time than single women. In any case, we have two distinct
cases to deal with: the superfluous and the voluntary; and it is
the voluntary whose grit we are most concerned to fertilize. But
here, again, we cannot put our finger on any particular case and
pick out Miss Robinson's as superfluous, and Miss Wilkinson's as
voluntary. Whether we legitimize the child of the unmarried woman
as a duty to the superfluous or as a bribe to the voluntary, the
practical result must be the same: to wit, that the condition of
marriage now attached to legitimate parentage will be withdrawn
from all women, and fertile unions outside marriage recognized by
society. Now clearly the consequences would not stop there. The
strong-minded ladies who are resolved to be mistresses in their
own houses would not be the only ones to take advantage of the new
law. Even women to whom a home without a man in it would be no
home at all, and who fully intended, if the man turned out to be
the right one, to live with him exactly as married couples live,
would, if they were possessed of independent means, have every
inducement to adopt the new conditions instead of the old ones.
Only the women whose sole means of livelihood was wifehood would
insist on marriage: hence a tendency would set in to make marriage
more and more one of the customs imposed by necessity on the poor,
whilst the freer form of union, regulated, no doubt, by
settlements and private contracts of various kinds, would become
the practice of the rich: that is, would become the fashion. At
which point nothing but the achievement of economic independence
by women, which is already seen clearly ahead of us, would be
needed to make marriage disappear altogether, not by formal
abolition, but by simple disuse. The private contract stage of
this process was reached in ancient Rome. The only practicable
alternative to it seems to be such an extension of divorce as will
reduce the risks and obligations of marriage to a degree at which
they will be no worse than those of the alternatives to marriage.
As we shall see, this is the solution to which all the arguments
tend. Meanwhile, note how much reason a statesman has to pause
before meddling with an institution which, unendurable as its
drawbacks are, threatens to come to pieces in all directions if a
single thread of it be cut. Ibsen's similitude of the machine-
made chain stitch, which unravels the whole seam at the first pull
when a single stitch is ripped, is very applicable to the knot of
marriage.


REMOTENESS OF THE FACTS FROM THE IDEAL

But before we allow this to deter us from touching the sacred
fabric, we must find out whether it is not already coming to
pieces in all directions by the continuous strain of
circumstances. No doubt, if it were all that it pretends to be,
and human nature were working smoothly within its limits, there
would be nothing more to be said: it would be let alone as it
always is let alone during the cruder stages of civilization. But
the moment we refer to the facts, we discover that the ideal
matrimony and domesticity which our bigots implore us to preserve
as the corner stone of our society is a figment: what we have
really got is something very different, questionable at its best,
and abominable at its worst. The word pure, so commonly applied to
it by thoughtless people, is absurd; because if they do not mean
celibate by it, they mean nothing; and if they do mean celibate,
then marriage is legalized impurity, a conclusion which is
offensive and inhuman. Marriage as a fact is not in the least like
marriage as an ideal. If it were, the sudden changes which have
been made on the continent from indissoluble Roman Catholic
marriage to marriage that can be dissolved by a box on the ear as
in France, by an epithet as in Germany, or simply at the wish of
both parties as in Sweden, not to mention the experiments made by
some of the American States, would have shaken society to its
foundations. Yet they have produced so little effect that
Englishmen open their eyes in surprise when told of their
existence.


DIFFICULTY OF OBTAINING EVIDENCE

As to what actual marriage is, one would like evidence instead of
guesses; but as all departures from the ideal are regarded as
disgraceful, evidence cannot be obtained; for when the whole
community is indicted, nobody will go into the witness-box for the
prosecution. Some guesses we can make with some confidence. For
example, if it be objected to any change that our bachelors and
widowers would no longer be Galahads, we may without extravagance
or cynicism reply that many of them are not Galahads now, and that
the only change would be that hypocrisy would no longer be
compulsory. Indeed, this can hardly be called guessing: the
evidence is in the streets. But when we attempt to find out the
truth about our marriages, we cannot even guess with any
confidence. Speaking for myself, I can say that I know the inside
history of perhaps half a dozen marriages. Any family solicitor
knows more than this; but even a family solicitor, however large
his practice, knows nothing of the million households which have
no solicitors, and which nevertheless make marriage what it really
is. And all he can say comes to no more than I can say: to wit,
that no marriage of which I have any knowledge is in the least
like the ideal marriage. I do not mean that it is worse: I mean
simply that it is different. Also, far from society being
organized in a defence of its ideal so jealous and implacable that
the least step from the straight path means exposure and ruin, it
is almost impossible by any extravagance of misconduct to provoke
society to relax its steady pretence of blindness, unless you do
one or both of two fatal things. One is to get into the
newspapers; and the other is to confess. If you confess misconduct
to respectable men or women, they must either disown you or become
virtually your accomplices: that is why they are so angry with you
for confessing. If you get into the papers, the pretence of not
knowing becomes impossible. But it is hardly too much to say that
if you avoid these two perils, you can do anything you like, as
far as your neighbors are concerned. And since we can hardly
flatter ourselves that this is the effect of charity, it is
difficult not to suspect that our extraordinary forbearance in the
matter of stone throwing is that suggested in the well-known
parable of the women taken in adultery which some early free-
thinker slipped into the Gospel of St John: namely, that we all
live in glass houses. We may take it, then, that the ideal husband
and the ideal wife are no more real human beings than the
cherubim. Possibly the great majority keeps its marriage vows in
the technical divorce court sense. No husband or wife yet born
keeps them or ever can keep them in the ideal sense.


MARRIAGE AS A MAGIC SPELL

The truth which people seem to overlook in this matter is that the
marriage ceremony is quite useless as a magic spell for changing
in an instant the nature of the relations of two human beings to
one another. If a man marries a woman after three weeks
acquaintance, and the day after meets a woman he has known for
twenty years, he finds, sometimes to his own irrational surprise
and his wife's equally irrational indignation, that his wife
is a stranger to him, and the other woman an old friend. Also,
there is no hocus pocus that can possibly be devized with rings
and veils and vows and benedictions that can fix either a man's or
woman's affection for twenty minutes, much less twenty years. Even
the most affectionate couples must have moments during which
they are far more conscious of one another's faults than of one
another's attractions. There are couples who dislike one another
furiously for several hours at a time; there are couples who
dislike one another permanently; and there are couples who never
dislike one another; but these last are people who are incapable
of disliking anybody. If they do not quarrel, it is not because
they are married, but because they are not quarrelsome. The
people who are quarrelsome quarrel with their husbands and wives
just as easily as with their servants and relatives and
acquaintances: marriage makes no difference. Those who talk and
write and legislate as if all this could be prevented by making
solemn vows that it shall not happen, are either insincere,
insane, or hopelessly stupid. There is some sense in a contract to
perform or abstain from actions that are reasonably within
voluntary control; but such contracts are only needed to provide
against the possibility of either party being no longer desirous
of the specified performance or abstention. A person proposing or
accepting a contract not only to do something but to like doing it
would be certified as mad. Yet popular superstition credits the
wedding rite with the power of fixing our fancies or affections
for life even under the most unnatural conditions.


THE IMPERSONALITY OF SEX

It is necessary to lay some stress on these points, because few
realize the extent to which we proceed on the assumption that
marriage is a short cut to perfect and permanent intimacy and
affection. But there is a still more unworkable assumption which
must be discarded before discussions of marriage can get into any
sort of touch with the facts of life. That assumption is that the
specific relation which marriage authorizes between the parties is
the most intimate and personal of human relations, and embraces
all the other high human relations. Now this is violently untrue.
Every adult knows that the relation in question can and does exist
between entire strangers, different in language, color, tastes,
class, civilization, morals, religion, character: in everything,
in short, except their bodily homology and the reproductive
appetite common to all living organisms. Even hatred, cruelty, and
contempt are not incompatible with it; and jealousy and murder are
as near to it as affectionate friendship. It is true that it is a
relation beset with wildly extravagant illusions for inexperienced
people, and that even the most experienced people have not always
sufficient analytic faculty to disentangle it from the sentiments,
sympathetic or abhorrent, which may spring up through the other
relations which are compulsorily attached to it by our laws, or
sentimentally associated with it in romance. But the fact remains
that the most disastrous marriages are those founded exclusively
on it, and the most successful those in which it has been least
considered, and in which the decisive considerations have had
nothing to do with sex, such as liking, money, congeniality of
tastes, similarity of habits, suitability of class, &c., &c.

It is no doubt necessary under existing circumstances for a woman
without property to be sexually attractive, because she must get
married to secure a livelihood; and the illusions of sexual
attraction will cause the imagination of young men to endow her
with every accomplishment and virtue that can make a wife a
treasure. The attraction being thus constantly and ruthlessly used
as a bait, both by individuals and by society, any discussion
tending to strip it of its illusions and get at its real natural
history is nervously discouraged. But nothing can well be more
unwholesome for everybody than the exaggeration and glorification
of an instinctive function which clouds the reason and upsets the
judgment more than all the other instincts put together. The
process may be pleasant and romantic; but the consequences are
not. It would be far better for everyone, as well as far honester,
if young people were taught that what they call love is an
appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the
moment by its gratification; that no profession, promise, or
proposal made under its influence should bind anybody; and that
its great natural purpose so completely transcends the personal
interests of any individual or even of any ten generations of
individuals that it should be held to be an act of prostitution
and even a sort of blasphemy to attempt to turn it to account by
exacting a personal return for its gratification, whether by
process of law or not. By all means let it be the subject of
contracts with society as to its consequences; but to make
marriage an open trade in it as at present, with money, board and
lodging, personal slavery, vows of eternal exclusive personal
sentimentalities and the rest of it as the price, is neither
virtuous, dignified, nor decent. No husband ever secured his
domestic happiness and honor, nor has any wife ever secured hers,
by relying on it. No private claims of any sort should be founded
on it: the real point of honor is to take no corrupt advantage of
it. When we hear of young women being led astray and the like, we
find that what has led them astray is a sedulously inculcated
false notion that the relation they are tempted to contract is
so intensely personal, and the vows made under the influence of
its transient infatuation so sacred and enduring, that only an
atrociously wicked man could make light of or forget them. What is
more, as the same fantastic errors are inculcated in men, and the
conscientious ones therefore feel bound in honor to stand by what
they have promised, one of the surest methods to obtain a
husband is to practise on his susceptibilities until he is either
carried away into a promise of marriage to which he can be legally
held, or else into an indiscretion which he must repair by
marriage on pain of having to regard himself as a scoundrel and a
seducer, besides facing the utmost damage the lady's relatives can
do him.

Such a transaction is not an entrance into a "holy state of
matrimony": it is as often as not the inauguration of a lifelong
squabble, a corroding grudge, that causes more misery and
degradation of character than a dozen entirely natural
"desertions" and "betrayals." Yet the number of marriages effected
more or less in this way must be enormous. When people say that
love should be free, their words, taken literally, may be foolish;
but they are only expressing inaccurately a very real need for the
disentanglement of sexual relations from a mass of exorbitant and
irrelevant conditions imposed on them on false pretences to enable
needy parents to get their daughters "off their hands" and to keep
those who are already married effectually enslaved by one another.


THE ECONOMIC SLAVERY OF WOMEN

One of the consequences of basing marriage on the considerations
stated with cold abhorrence by Saint Paul in the seventh chapter
of his epistle to the Corinthians, as being made necessary by the
unlikeness of most men to himself, is that the sex slavery
involved has become complicated by economic slavery; so that
whilst the man defends marriage because he is really defending his
pleasures, the woman is even more vehement on the same side
because she is defending her only means of livelihood. To a woman
without property or marketable talent a husband is more necessary
than a master to a dog. There is nothing more wounding to our
sense of human dignity than the husband hunting that begins in
every family when the daughters become marriageable; but it is
inevitable under existing circumstances; and the parents who
refuse to engage in it are bad parents, though they may be
superior individuals. The cubs of a humane tigress would starve;
and the daughters of women who cannot bring themselves to devote
several years of their lives to the pursuit of sons-in-law often
have to expatiate their mother's squeamishness by life-long
celibacy and indigence. To ask a young man his intentions when you
know he has no intentions, but is unable to deny that he has paid
attentions; to threaten an action for breach of promise of
marriage; to pretend that your daughter is a musician when she has
with the greatest difficulty been coached into playing three
piano-forte pieces which she loathes; to use your own mature
charms to attract men to the house when your daughters have no
aptitude for that department of sport; to coach them, when they
have, in the arts by which men can be led to compromize
themselves; and to keep all the skeletons carefully locked up in
the family cupboard until the prey is duly hunted down and bagged:
all this is a mother's duty today; and a very revolting duty it
is: one that disposes of the conventional assumption that it is in
the faithful discharge of her home duties that a woman finds her
self-respect. The truth is that family life will never be decent,
much less ennobling, until this central horror of the dependence
of women on men is done away with. At present it reduces the
difference between marriage and prostitution to the difference
between Trade Unionism and unorganized casual labor: a huge
difference, no doubt, as to order and comfort, but not a
difference in kind.

However, it is not by any reform of the marriage laws that this
can be dealt with. It is in the general movement for the
prevention of destitution that the means for making women
independent of the compulsory sale of their persons, in marriage
or otherwise, will be found; but meanwhile those who deal
specifically with the marriage laws should never allow themselves
for a moment to forget this abomination that "plucks the rose from
the fair forehead of an innocent love, and sets a blister there,"
and then calmly calls itself purity, home, motherhood,
respectability, honor, decency, and any other fine name that
happens to be convenient, not to mention the foul epithets it
hurls freely at those who are ashamed of it.


UNPOPULARITY OF IMPERSONAL VIEWS

Unfortunately it is very hard to make an average citizen take
impersonal views of any sort in matters affecting personal comfort
or conduct. We may be enthusiastic Liberals or Conservatives
without any hope of seats in Parliament, knighthoods, or posts in
the Government, because party politics do not make the slightest
difference in our daily lives and therefore cost us nothing. But
to take a vital process in which we are keenly interested personal
instruments, and ask us to regard it, and feel about it, and
legislate on it, wholly as if it were an impersonal one, is to
make a higher demand than most people seem capable of responding
to. We all have personal interests in marriage which we are not
prepared to sink. It is not only the women who want to get
married: the men do too, sometimes on sentimental grounds,
sometimes on the more sordid calculation that bachelor life is
less comfortable and more expensive, since a wife pays for her
status with domestic service as well as with the other services
expected of her. Now that children are avoidable, this calculation
is becoming more common and conscious than it was: a result which
is regarded as "a steady improvement in general morality."


IMPERSONALITY IS NOT PROMISCUITY

There is, too, a really appalling prevalence of the superstition
that the sexual instinct in men is utterly promiscuous, and that
the least relaxation of law and custom must produce a wild
outbreak of licentiousness. As far as our moralists can grasp the
proposition that we should deal with the sexual relation as
impersonal, it seems to them to mean that we should encourage it
to be promiscuous: hence their recoil from it. But promiscuity
and impersonality are not the same thing. No man ever fell in love
with the entire female sex, nor any woman with the entire male
sex. We often do not fall in love at all; and when we do we fall
in love with one person and remain indifferent to thousands of
others who pass before our eyes every day. Selection, carried even
to such fastidiousness as to induce people to say quite commonly
that there is only one man or woman in the world for them, is the
rule in nature. If anyone doubts this, let him open a shop for the
sale of picture postcards, and, when an enamoured lady customer
demands a portrait of her favorite actor or a gentleman of his
favorite actress, try to substitute some other portrait on the
ground that since the sexual instinct is promiscuous, one portrait
is as pleasing as another. I suppose no shopkeeper has ever been
foolish enough to do such a thing; and yet all our shopkeepers,
the moment a discussion arises on marriage, will passionately
argue against all reform on the ground that nothing but the most
severe coercion can save their wives and daughters from
quite indiscriminate rapine.


DOMESTIC CHANGE OF AIR

Our relief at the morality of the reassurance that man is not
promiscuous in his fancies must not blind us to the fact that he
is (to use the word coined by certain American writers to describe
themselves) something of a Varietist. Even those who say there is
only one man or woman in the world for them, find that it is not
always the same man or woman. It happens that our law permits us
to study this phenomenon among entirely law-abiding people. I know
one lady who has been married five times. She is, as might be
expected, a wise, attractive, and interesting woman. The question
is, is she wise, attractive, and interesting because she has been
married five times, or has she been married five times because she
is wise, attractive, and interesting? Probably some of the truth
lies both ways. I also know of a household consisting of three
families, A having married first B, and then C, who afterwards
married D. All three unions were fruitful; so that the children
had a change both of fathers and mothers. Now I cannot honestly
say that these and similar cases have convinced me that people are
the worse for a change. The lady who has married and managed five
husbands must be much more expert at it than most monogamic
ladies; and as a companion and counsellor she probably leaves them
nowhere. Mr Kipling's question

"What can they know of England that only England know?"

disposes not only of the patriots who are so patriotic that they
never leave their own country to look at another, but of the
citizens who are so domestic that they have never married again
and never loved anyone except their own husbands and wives. The
domestic doctrinaires are also the dull people. The impersonal
relation of sex may be judicially reserved for one person; but any
such reservation of friendship, affection, admiration, sympathy
and so forth is only possible to a wretchedly narrow and jealous
nature; and neither history nor contemporary society shews us a
single amiable and respectable character capable of it. This has
always been recognized in cultivated society: that is why poor
people accuse cultivated society of profligacy, poor people being
often so ignorant and uncultivated that they have nothing to offer
each other but the sex relationship, and cannot conceive why men
and women should associate for any other purpose.

As to the children of the triple household, they were not only on
excellent terms with one another, and never thought of any
distinction between their full and their half brothers and
sisters; but they had the superior sociability which distinguishes
the people who live in communities from those who live in small
families.

The inference is that changes of partners are not in themselves
injurious or undesirable. People are not demoralized by them when
they are effected according to law. Therefore we need not hesitate
to alter the law merely because the alteration would make such
changes easier.


HOME MANNERS ARE BAD MANNERS

On the other hand, we have all seen the bonds of marriage vilely
abused by people who are never classed with shrews and wife-
beaters: they are indeed sometimes held up as models of
domesticity because they do not drink nor gamble nor neglect their
children nor tolerate dirt and untidiness, and because they are
not amiable enough to have what are called amiable weaknesses.
These terrors conceive marriage as a dispensation from all the
common civilities and delicacies which they have to observe
among strangers, or, as they put it, "before company." And here
the effects of indissoluble marriage-for-better-for-worse are very
plainly and disagreeably seen. If such people took their domestic
manners into general society, they would very soon find themselves
without a friend or even an acquaintance in the world. There are
women who, through total disuse, have lost the power of kindly
human speech and can only scold and complain: there are men who
grumble and nag from inveterate habit even when they are
comfortable. But their unfortunate spouses and children cannot
escape from them.


SPURIOUS "NATURAL" AFFECTION

What is more, they are protected from even such discomfort as the
dislike of his prisoners may cause to a gaoler by the hypnotism of
the convention that the natural relation between husband and wife
and parent and child is one of intense affection, and that to feel
any other sentiment towards a member of one's family is to be a
monster. Under the influence of the emotion thus manufactured the
most detestable people are spoilt with entirely undeserved
deference, obedience, and even affection whilst they live, and
mourned when they die by those whose lives they wantonly or
maliciously made miserable. And this is what we call natural
conduct. Nothing could well be less natural. That such a
convention should have been established shews that the
indissolubility of marriage creates such intolerable situations
that only by beglamoring the human imagination with a hypnotic
suggestion of wholly unnatural feelings can it be made to keep up
appearances.

If the sentimental theory of family relationship encourages bad
manners and personal slovenliness and uncleanness in the home, it
also, in the case of sentimental people, encourages the practice
of rousing and playing on the affections of children prematurely
and far too frequently. The lady who says that as her religion is
love, her children shall be brought up in an atmosphere of love,
and institutes a system of sedulous endearments and exchanges of
presents and conscious and studied acts of artificial kindness,
may be defeated in a large family by the healthy derision and
rebellion of children who have acquired hardihood and common sense
in their conflicts with one another. But the small families, which
are the rule just now, succumb more easily; and in the case of a
single sensitive child the effect of being forced in a hothouse
atmosphere of unnatural affection may be disastrous.

In short, whichever way you take it, the convention that marriage
and family relationship produces special feelings which alter the
nature of human intercourse is a mischievous one. The whole
difficulty of bringing up a family well is the difficulty of
making its members behave as considerately at home as on a visit
in a strange house, and as frankly, kindly, and easily in a
strange house as at home. In the middle classes, where the
segregation of the artificially limited family in its little
brick box is horribly complete, bad manners, ugly dresses,
awkwardness, cowardice, peevishness, and all the petty vices of
unsociability flourish like mushrooms in a cellar. In the upper
class, where families are not limited for money reasons; where at
least two houses and sometimes three or four are the rule (not to
mention the clubs); where there is travelling and hotel life; and
where the men are brought up, not in the family, but in public
schools, universities, and the naval and military services,
besides being constantly in social training in other people's
houses, the result is to produce what may be called, in comparison
with the middle class, something that might almost pass as a
different and much more sociable species. And in the very poorest
class, where people have no homes, only sleeping places, and
consequently live practically in the streets, sociability again
appears, leaving the middle class despised and disliked for its
helpless and offensive unsociability as much by those below it as
those above it, and yet ignorant enough to be proud of it, and to
hold itself up as a model for the reform of the (as it considers)
elegantly vicious rich and profligate poor alike.


CARRYING THE WAR INTO THE ENEMY'S COUNTRY

Without pretending to exhaust the subject, I have said enough to
make it clear that the moment we lose the desire to defend our
present matrimonial and family arrangements, there will be no
difficulty in making out an overwhelming case against them. No
doubt until then we shall continue to hold up the British home as
the Holy of Holies in the temple of honorable motherhood, innocent
childhood, manly virtue, and sweet and wholesome national life.
But with a clever turn of the hand this holy of holies can be
exposed as an Augean stable, so filthy that it would seem more
hopeful to burn it down than to attempt to sweep it out. And this
latter view will perhaps prevail if the idolaters of marriage
persist in refusing all proposals for reform and treating those
who advocate it as infamous delinquents. Neither view is of any
use except as a poisoned arrow in a fierce fight between two
parties determined to discredit each other with a view to
obtaining powers of legal coercion over one another.


SHELLEY AND QUEEN VICTORIA

The best way to avert such a struggle is to open the eyes of the
thoughtlessly conventional people to the weakness of their
position in a mere contest of recrimination. Hitherto they have
assumed that they have the advantage of coming into the field
without a stain on their characters to combat libertines who have
no character at all. They conceive it to be their duty to throw
mud; and they feel that even if the enemy can find any mud to
throw, none of it will stick. They are mistaken. There will be
plenty of that sort of ammunition in the other camp; and most of
it will stick very hard indeed. The moral is, do not throw any. If
we can imagine Shelley and Queen Victoria arguing out their
differences in another world, we may be sure that the Queen has
long ago found that she cannot settle the question by classing
Shelley with George IV. as a bad man; and Shelley is not likely to
have called her vile names on the general ground that as the
economic dependence of women makes marriage a money bargain in
which the man is the purchaser and the woman the purchased, there
is no essential difference between a married woman and the woman
of the streets. Unfortunately, all the people whose methods of
controversy are represented by our popular newspapers are not
Queen Victorias and Shelleys. A great mass of them, when their
prejudices are challenged, have no other impulse than to call the
challenger names, and, when the crowd seems to be on their side,
to maltreat him personally or hand him over to the law, if he is
vulnerable to it. Therefore I cannot say that I have any certainty
that the marriage question will be dealt with decently and
tolerantly. But dealt with it will be, decently or indecently; for
the present state of things in England is too strained and
mischievous to last. Europe and America have left us a century
behind in this matter.


A PROBABLE EFFECT OF GIVING WOMEN THE VOTE

The political emancipation of women is likely to lead to a
comparatively stringent enforcement by law of sexual morality
(that is why so many of us dread it); and this will soon compel us
to consider what our sexual morality shall be. At present a
ridiculous distinction is made between vice and crime, in order
that men may be vicious with impunity. Adultery, for instance,
though it is sometimes fiercely punished by giving an injured
husband crushing damages in a divorce suit (injured wives are not
considered in this way), is not now directly prosecuted; and this
impunity extends to illicit relations between unmarried persons
who have reached what is called the age of consent. There are
other matters, such as notification of contagious disease and
solicitation, in which the hand of the law has been brought
down on one sex only. Outrages which were capital offences within
the memory of persons still living when committed on women outside
marriage, can still be inflicted by men on their wives without
legal remedy. At all such points the code will be screwed up by
the operation of Votes for Women, if there be any virtue in the
franchise at all. The result will be that men will find the more
ascetic side of our sexual morality taken seriously by the law. It
is easy to foresee the consequences. No man will take much trouble
to alter laws which he can evade, or which are either not enforced
or enforced on women only. But when these laws take him by the
collar and thrust him into prison, he suddenly becomes keenly
critical of them, and of the arguments by which they are
supported. Now we have seen that our marriage laws will not stand
criticism, and that they have held out so far only because they
are so worked as to fit roughly our state of society, in which
women are neither politically nor personally free, in which indeed
women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as
existing solely for the use of men. When Liberalism enfranchises
them politically, and Socialism emancipates them economically,
they will no longer allow the law to take immorality so easily.
Both men and women will be forced to behave morally in sex
matters; and when they find that this is inevitable they will
raise the question of what behavior really should be established
as moral. If they decide in favor of our present professed
morality they will have to make a revolutionary change in their
habits by becoming in fact what they only pretend to be at
present. If, on the other hand, they find that this would be an
unbearable tyranny, without even the excuse of justice or sound
eugenics, they will reconsider their morality and remodel the law.