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Title: Getting Married

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5604]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 20, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_________________________________________________________________

Transcriber's Note -- The edition from which this play was taken
was printed without most contractions, such as dont for don't and
so forth. These have been left as printed in the original text.
Also, abbreviated honorifics have no trailing period, and the word
show is spelt shew.
_________________________________________________________________




GETTING MARRIED, PREFACE TO

Bernard Shaw

1908


THE REVOLT AGAINST MARRIAGE

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and
thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and
thinking it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into
disastrous anarchical action. Because our marriage law is inhuman
and unreasonable to the point of downright abomination, the bolder
and more rebellious spirits form illicit unions, defiantly sending
cards round to their friends announcing what they have
done. Young women come to me and ask me whether I think they ought
to consent to marry the man they have decided to live with; and
they are perplexed and astonished when I, who am supposed (heaven
knows why!) to have the most advanced views attainable on the
subject, urge them on no account to compromize themselves without
the security of an authentic wedding ring. They cite the example
of George Eliot, who formed an illicit union with Lewes. They
quote a saying attributed to Nietzsche, that a married philosopher
is ridiculous, though the men of their choice are not
philosophers. When they finally give up the idea of reforming our
marriage institutions by private enterprise and personal
righteousness, and consent to be led to the Registry or even to
the altar, they insist on first arriving at an explicit
understanding that both parties are to be perfectly free to sip
every flower and change every hour, as their fancy may dictate, in
spite of the legal bond. I do not observe that their unions prove
less monogamic than other people's: rather the contrary, in fact;
consequently, I do not know whether they make less fuss than
ordinary people when either party claims the benefit of the
treaty; but the existence of the treaty shews the same anarchical
notion that the law can be set aside by any two private persons by
the simple process of promising one another to ignore it.


MARRIAGE NEVERTHELESS INEVITABLE

Now most laws are, and all laws ought to be, stronger than the
strongest individual. Certainly the marriage law is. The only
people who successfully evade it are those who actually avail
themselves of its shelter by pretending to be married when they
are not, and by Bohemians who have no position to lose and no
career to be closed. In every other case open violation of the
marriage laws means either downright ruin or such inconvenience
and disablement as a prudent man or woman would get married ten
times over rather than face. And these disablements and
inconveniences are not even the price of freedom; for, as Brieux
has shewn so convincingly in Les Hannetons, an avowedly illicit
union is often found in practice to be as tyrannical and as hard
to escape from as the worst legal one.

We may take it then that when a joint domestic establishment,
involving questions of children or property, is contemplated,
marriage is in effect compulsory upon all normal people; and until
the law is altered there is nothing for us but to make the best of
it as it stands. Even when no such establishment is desired,
clandestine irregularities are negligible as an alternative to
marriage. How common they are nobody knows; for in spite of the
powerful protection afforded to the parties by the law of libel,
and the readiness of society on various other grounds to be
hoodwinked by the keeping up of the very thinnest appearances,
most of them are probably never suspected. But they are neither
dignified nor safe and comfortable, which at once rules them out
for normal decent people. Marriage remains practically inevitable;
and the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we shall set to
work to make it decent and reasonable.


WHAT DOES THE WORD MARRIAGE MEAN

However much we may all suffer through marriage, most of us think
so little about it that we regard it as a fixed part of the order
of nature, like gravitation. Except for this error, which may be
regarded as constant, we use the word with reckless looseness,
meaning a dozen different things by it, and yet always assuming
that to a respectable man it can have only one meaning. The pious
citizen, suspecting the Socialist (for example) of unmentionable
things, and asking him heatedly whether he wishes to abolish
marriage, is infuriated by a sense of unanswerable quibbling when
the Socialist asks him what particular variety of marriage he
means: English civil marriage, sacramental marriage, indissoluble
Roman Catholic marriage, marriage of divorced persons, Scotch
marriage, Irish marriage, French, German, Turkish, or South
Dakotan marriage. In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized
countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties
wish it, without any question of conduct. That is what marriage
means in Sweden. In Clapham that is what they call by the
senseless name of Free Love. In the British Empire we have
unlimited Kulin polygamy, Muslim polygamy limited to four wives,
child marriages, and, nearer home, marriages of first cousins: all
of them abominations in the eyes of many worthy persons. Not only
may the respectable British champion of marriage mean any of these
widely different institutions; sometimes he does not mean marriage
at all. He means monogamy, chastity, temperance, respectability,
morality, Christianity, anti-socialism, and a dozen other things
that have no necessary connection with marriage. He often means
something that he dare not avow: ownership of the person of
another human being, for instance. And he never tells the truth
about his own marriage either to himself or any one else.

With those individualists who in the mid-XIXth century dreamt of
doing away with marriage altogether on the ground that it is a
private concern between the two parties with which society has
nothing to do, there is now no need to deal. The vogue of "the
self-regarding action" has passed; and it may be assumed without
argument that unions for the purpose of establishing a family
will continue to be registered and regulated by the State.
Such registration is marriage, and will continue to be called
marriage long after the conditions of the registration have
changed so much that no citizen now living would recognize them as
marriage conditions at all if he revisited the earth. There is
therefore no question of abolishing marriage; but there is a very
pressing question of improving its conditions. I have never met
anybody really in favor of maintaining marriage as it exists in
England to-day. A Roman Catholic may obey his Church by assenting
verbally to the doctrine of indissoluble marriage. But nobody
worth counting believes directly, frankly, and instinctively that
when a person commits a murder and is put into prison for twenty
years for it, the free and innocent husband or wife of that
murderer should remain bound by the marriage. To put it briefly, a
contract for better for worse is a contract that should not be
tolerated. As a matter of fact it is not tolerated fully even by
the Roman Catholic Church; for Roman Catholic marriages can be
dissolved, if not by the temporal Courts, by the Pope.
Indissoluble marriage is an academic figment, advocated only by
celibates and by comfortably married people who imagine that if
other couples are uncomfortable it must be their own fault, just
as rich people are apt to imagine that if other people are poor it
serves them right. There is always some means of dissolution. The
conditions of dissolution may vary widely, from those on which
Henry VIII. procured his divorce from Katharine of Arragon to the
pleas on which American wives obtain divorces (for instance,
"mental anguish" caused by the husband's neglect to cut his
toenails); but there is always some point at which the theory
of the inviolable better-for-worse marriage breaks down in
practice. South Carolina has indeed passed what is called a freak
law declaring that a marriage shall not be dissolved under any
circumstances; but such an absurdity will probably be repealed or
amended by sheer force of circumstances before these words are in
print. The only question to be considered is, What shall the
conditions of the dissolution be?


SURVIVALS OF SEX SLAVERY

If we adopt the common romantic assumption that the object of
marriage is bliss, then the very strongest reason for dissolving a
marriage is that it shall be disagreeable to one or other or both
of the parties. If we accept the view that the object of marriage
is to provide for the production and rearing of children, then
childlessness should be a conclusive reason for dissolution. As
neither of these causes entitles married persons to divorce it is
at once clear that our marriage law is not founded on either
assumption. What it is really founded on is the morality of the
tenth commandment, which English women will one day succeed in
obliterating from the walls of our churches by refusing to enter
any building where they are publicly classed with a man's house,
his ox, and his ass, as his purchased chattels. In this morality
female adultery is malversation by the woman and theft by the man,
whilst male adultery with an unmarried woman is not an offence at
all. But though this is not only the theory of our marriage laws,
but the practical morality of many of us, it is no longer an
avowed morality, nor does its persistence depend on marriage; for
the abolition of marriage would, other things remaining unchanged,
leave women more effectually enslaved than they now are. We shall
come to the question of the economic dependence of women on men
later on; but at present we had better confine ourselves to the
theories of marriage which we are not ashamed to acknowledge and
defend, and upon which, therefore, marriage reformers will be
obliged to proceed.

We may, I think, dismiss from the field of practical politics the
extreme sacerdotal view of marriage as a sacred and indissoluble
covenant, because though reinforced by unhappy marriages as all
fanaticisms are reinforced by human sacrifices, it has been
reduced to a private and socially inoperative eccentricity by the
introduction of civil marriage and divorce. Theoretically, our
civilly married couples are to a Catholic as unmarried couples
are: that is, they are living in open sin. Practically, civilly
married couples are received in society, by Catholics and everyone
else, precisely as sacramentally married couples are; and so are
people who have divorced their wives or husbands and married
again. And yet marriage is enforced by public opinion with such
ferocity that the least suggestion of laxity in its support is
fatal to even the highest and strongest reputations, although
laxity of conduct is winked at with grinning indulgence; so that
we find the austere Shelley denounced as a fiend in human form,
whilst Nelson, who openly left his wife and formed a menage a
trois with Sir William and Lady Hamilton, was idolized. Shelley
might have had an illegitimate child in every county in England if
he had done so frankly as a sinner. His unpardonable offence was
that he attacked marriage as an institution. We feel a strange
anguish of terror and hatred against him, as against one who
threatens us with a mortal injury. What is the element in his
proposals that produces this effect?

The answer of the specialists is the one already alluded to: that
the attack on marriage is an attack on property; so that Shelley
was something more hateful to a husband than a horse thief: to
wit, a wife thief, and something more hateful to a wife than a
burglar: namely, one who would steal her husband's house from over
her head, and leave her destitute and nameless on the streets.
Now, no doubt this accounts for a good deal of anti-Shelleyan
prejudice: a prejudice so deeply rooted in our habits that, as I
have shewn in my play, men who are bolder freethinkers than
Shelley himself can no more bring themselves to commit adultery
than to commit any common theft, whilst women who loathe sex
slavery more fiercely than Mary Wollstonecraft are unable to face
the insecurity and discredit of the vagabondage which is the
masterless woman's only alternative to celibacy. But in spite of
all this there is a revolt against marriage which has spread so
rapidly within my recollection that though we all still assume the
existence of a huge and dangerous majority which regards the least
hint of scepticism as to the beauty and holiness of marriage as
infamous and abhorrent, I sometimes wonder why it is so difficult
to find an authentic living member of this dreaded army of
convention outside the ranks of the people who never think about
public questions at all, and who, for all their numerical weight
and apparently invincible prejudices, accept social changes to-day
as tamely as their forefathers accepted the Reformation under
Henry and Edward, the Restoration under Mary, and, after Mary's
death, the shandygaff which Elizabeth compounded from both
doctrines and called the Articles of the Church of England. If
matters were left to these simple folk, there would never be any
changes at all; and society would perish like a snake that could
not cast its skins. Nevertheless the snake does change its skin in
spite of them; and there are signs that our marriage-law skin is
causing discomfort to thoughtful people and will presently be cast
whether the others are satisfied with it or not. The question
therefore arises: What is there in marriage that makes the
thoughtful people so uncomfortable?


A NEW ATTACK ON MARRIAGE

The answer to this question is an answer which everybody knows and
nobody likes to give. What is driving our ministers of religion
and statesmen to blurt it out at last is the plain fact that
marriage is now beginning to depopulate the country with such
alarming rapidity that we are forced to throw aside our modesty
like people who, awakened by an alarm of fire, rush into the
streets in their nightdresses or in no dresses at all. The
fictitious Free Lover, who was supposed to attack marriage
because it thwarted his inordinate affections and prevented him
from making life a carnival, has vanished and given place to the
very real, very strong, very austere avenger of outraged decency
who declares that the licentiousness of marriage, now that it no
longer recruits the race, is destroying it.

As usual, this change of front has not yet been noticed by our
newspaper controversialists and by the suburban season-ticket
holders whose minds the newspapers make. They still defend the
citadel on the side on which nobody is attacking it, and leave its
weakest front undefended.

The religious revolt against marriage is a very old one.
Christianity began with a fierce attack on marriage; and to this
day the celibacy of the Roman Catholic priesthood is a standing
protest against its compatibility with the higher life. St. Paul's
reluctant sanction of marriage; his personal protest that he
countenanced it of necessity and against his own conviction; his
contemptuous "better to marry than to burn" is only out of date in
respect of his belief that the end of the world was at hand and
that there was therefore no longer any population question. His
instinctive recoil from its worst aspect as a slavery to pleasure
which induces two people to accept slavery to one another has
remained an active force in the world to this day, and is now
stirring more uneasily than ever. We have more and more Pauline
celibates whose objection to marriage is the intolerable indignity
of being supposed to desire or live the married life as ordinarily
conceived. Every thoughtful and observant minister of religion is
troubled by the determination of his flock to regard marriage as a
sanctuary for pleasure, seeing as he does that the known
libertines of his parish are visibly suffering much less from
intemperance than many of the married people who stigmatize them
as monsters of vice.


A FORGOTTEN CONFERENCE OF MARRIED MEN

The late Hugh Price Hughes, an eminent Methodist divine, once
organized in London a conference of respectable men to consider
the subject. Nothing came of it (nor indeed could have come of it
in the absence of women); but it had its value as giving the young
sociologists present, of whom I was one, an authentic notion of
what a picked audience of respectable men understood by married
life. It was certainly a staggering revelation. Peter the Great
would have been shocked; Byron would have been horrified; Don Juan
would have fled from the conference into a monastery. The
respectable men all regarded the marriage ceremony as a rite which
absolved them from the laws of health and temperance; inaugurated
a life-long honeymoon; and placed their pleasures on exactly the
same footing as their prayers. It seemed entirely proper and
natural to them that out of every twenty-four hours of their lives
they should pass eight shut up in one room with their wives alone,
and this, not birdlike, for the mating season, but all the year
round and every year. How they settled even such minor questions
as to which party should decide whether and how much the window
should be open and how many blankets should be on the bed, and at
what hour they should go to bed and get up so as to avoid
disturbing one another's sleep, seemed insoluble questions to me.
But the members of the conference did not seem to mind. They were
content to have the whole national housing problem treated on a
basis of one room for two people. That was the essence of marriage
for them.

Please remember, too, that there was nothing in their
circumstances to check intemperance. They were men of business:
that is, men for the most part engaged in routine work which
exercized neither their minds nor their bodies to the full pitch
of their capacities. Compared with statesmen, first-rate
professional men, artists, and even with laborers and artisans as
far as muscular exertion goes, they were underworked, and could
spare the fine edge of their faculties and the last few inches of
their chests without being any the less fit for their daily
routine. If I had adopted their habits, a startling deterioration
would have appeared in my writing before the end of a fortnight,
and frightened me back to what they would have considered an
impossible asceticism. But they paid no penalty of which they were
conscious. They had as much health as they wanted: that is, they
did not feel the need of a doctor. They enjoyed their smokes,
their meals, their respectable clothes, their affectionate games
with their children, their prospects of larger profits or higher
salaries, their Saturday half holidays and Sunday walks, and the
rest of it. They did less than two hours work a day and took from
seven to nine office hours to do it in. And they were no good for
any mortal purpose except to go on doing it. They were respectable
only by the standard they themselves had set. Considered seriously
as electors governing an empire through their votes, and choosing
and maintaining its religious and moral institutions by their
powers of social persecution, they were a black-coated army of
calamity. They were incapable of comprehending the industries they
were engaged in, the laws under which they lived, or the relation
of their country to other countries. They lived the lives of old
men contentedly. They were timidly conservative at the age at
which every healthy human being ought to be obstreperously
revolutionary. And their wives went through the routine of the
kitchen, nursery, and drawing-room just as they went through the
routine of the office. They had all, as they called it, settled
down, like balloons that had lost their lifting margin of gas; and
it was evident that the process of settling down would go on until
they settled into their graves. They read old-fashioned newspapers
with effort, and were just taking with avidity to a new sort of
paper, costing a halfpenny, which they believed to be
extraordinarily bright and attractive, and which never really
succeeded until it became extremely dull, discarding all serious
news and replacing it by vapid tittle-tattle, and substituting for
political articles informed by at least some pretence of knowledge
of economics, history, and constitutional law, such paltry follies
and sentimentalities, snobberies and partisaneries, as ignorance
can understand and irresponsibility relish.

What they called patriotism was a conviction that because they
were born in Tooting or Camberwell, they were the natural
superiors of Beethoven, of Rodin, of Ibsen, of Tolstoy and all
other benighted foreigners. Those of them who did not think it
wrong to go to the theatre liked above everything a play in which
the hero was called Dick; was continually fingering a briar pipe;
and, after being overwhelmed with admiration and affection
through three acts, was finally rewarded with the legal possession
of a pretty heroine's person on the strength of a staggering lack
of virtue. Indeed their only conception of the meaning of the word
virtue was abstention from stealing other men's wives or from
refusing to marry their daughters.

As to law, religion, ethics, and constitutional government, any
counterfeit could impose on them. Any atheist could pass himself
off on them as a bishop, any anarchist as a judge, any despot as a
Whig, any sentimental socialist as a Tory, any philtre-monger or
witch-finder as a man of science, any phrase-maker as a statesman.
Those who did not believe the story of Jonah and the great fish
were all the readier to believe that metals can be transmuted and
all diseases cured by radium, and that men can live for two
hundred years by drinking sour milk. Even these credulities
involved too severe an intellectual effort for many of them: it
was easier to grin and believe nothing. They maintained their
respect for themselves by "playing the game" (that is, doing what
everybody else did), and by being good judges of hats, ties, dogs,
pipes, cricket, gardens, flowers, and the like. They were capable
of discussing each other's solvency and respectability with some
shrewdness, and could carry out quite complicated systems of
paying visits and "knowing" one another. They felt a little vulgar
when they spent a day at Margate, and quite distinguished and
travelled when they spent it at Boulogne. They were, except as to
their clothes, "not particular": that is, they could put up with
ugly sights and sounds, unhealthy smells, and inconvenient houses,
with inhuman apathy and callousness. They had, as to adults, a
theory that human nature is so poor that it is useless to try to
make the world any better, whilst as to children they believed
that if they were only sufficiently lectured and whipped, they
could be brought to a state of moral perfection such as no fanatic
has ever ascribed to his deity. Though they were not intentionally
malicious, they practised the most appalling cruelties from mere
thoughtlessness, thinking nothing of imprisoning men and women for
periods up to twenty years for breaking into their houses; of
treating their children as wild beasts to be tamed by a system of
blows and imprisonment which they called education; and of keeping
pianos in their houses, not for musical purposes, but to torment
their daughters with a senseless stupidity that would have
revolted an inquisitor.

In short, dear reader, they were very like you and me. I could
fill a hundred pages with the tale of our imbecilities and still
leave much untold; but what I have set down here haphazard is
enough to condemn the system that produced us. The corner stone of
that system was the family and the institution of marriage as we
have it to-day in England.


HEARTH AND HOME

There is no shirking it: if marriage cannot be made to produce
something better than we are, marriage will have to go, or else
the nation will have to go. It is no use talking of honor, virtue,
purity, and wholesome, sweet, clean, English home lives when what
is meant is simply the habits I have described. The flat fact is
that English home life to-day is neither honorable, virtuous,
wholesome, sweet, clean, nor in any creditable way distinctively
English. It is in many respects conspicuously the reverse; and the
result of withdrawing children from it completely at an early age,
and sending them to a public school and then to a university,
does, in spite of the fact that these institutions are class
warped and in some respects quite abominably corrupt, produce
sociabler men. Women, too, are improved by the escape from home
provided by women's colleges; but as very few of them are
fortunate enough to enjoy this advantage, most women are so
thoroughly home-bred as to be unfit for human society. So little
is expected of them that in Sheridan's School for Scandal we
hardly notice that the heroine is a female cad, as detestable and
dishonorable in her repentance as she is vulgar and silly in her
naughtiness. It was left to an abnormal critic like George Gissing
to point out the glaring fact that in the remarkable set of life
studies of XIXth century women to be found in the novels of
Dickens, the most convincingly real ones are either vilely
unamiable or comically contemptible; whilst his attempts to
manufacture admirable heroines by idealizations of home-bred
womanhood are not only absurd but not even pleasantly absurd: one
has no patience with them.

As all this is corrigible by reducing home life and domestic
sentiment to something like reasonable proportions in the life of
the individual, the danger of it does not lie in human nature.
Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage
is natural to a cockatoo. Its grave danger to the nation lies in
its narrow views, its unnaturally sustained and spitefully jealous
concupiscences, its petty tyrannies, its false social pretences,
its endless grudges and squabbles, its sacrifice of the boy's
future by setting him to earn money to help the family when he
should be in training for his adult life (remember the boy Dickens
and the blacking factory), and of the girl's chances by making her
a slave to sick or selfish parents, its unnatural packing into
little brick boxes of little parcels of humanity of ill-assorted
ages, with the old scolding or beating the young for behaving like
young people, and the young hating and thwarting the old for
behaving like old people, and all the other ills, mentionable and
unmentionable, that arise from excessive segregation. It sets
these evils up as benefits and blessings representing the highest
attainable degree of honor and virtue, whilst any criticism of or
revolt against them is savagely persecuted as the extremity of
vice. The revolt, driven under ground and exacerbated, produces
debauchery veiled by hypocrisy, an overwhelming demand for
licentious theatrical entertainments which no censorship can stem,
and, worst of all, a confusion of virtue with the mere morality
that steals its name until the real thing is loathed because the
imposture is loathsome. Literary traditions spring up in which the
libertine and profligate--Tom Jones and Charles Surface are the
heroes, and decorous, law-abiding persons--Blifil and Joseph
Surface--are the villains and butts. People like to believe that
Nell Gwynne has every amiable quality and the Bishop's wife every
odious one. Poor Mr. Pecksniff, who is generally no worse than a
humbug with a turn for pompous talking, is represented as a
criminal instead of as a very typical English paterfamilias
keeping a roof over the head of himself and his daughters by
inducing people to pay him more for his services than they are
worth. In the extreme instances of reaction against convention,
female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage; and when
Nature throws up that rare phenomenon, an unscrupulous libertine,
his success among "well brought-up" girls is so easy, and the
devotion he inspires so extravagant, that it is impossible not to
see that the revolt against conventional respectability has
transfigured a commonplace rascal into a sort of Anarchist
Saviour. As to the respectable voluptuary, who joins Omar Khayyam
clubs and vibrates to Swinburne's invocation of Dolores to "come
down and redeem us from virtue," he is to be found in every
suburb.


TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

We must be reasonable in our domestic ideals. I do not think that
life at a public sehool is altogether good for a boy any more than
barrack life is altogether good for a soldier. But neither is home
life altogether good. Such good as it does, I should say, is due
to its freedom from the very atmosphere it professes to supply.
That atmosphere is usually described as an atmosphere of love; and
this definition should be sufficient to put any sane person on
guard against it. The people who talk and write as if the highest
attainable state is that of a family stewing in love continuously
from the cradle to the grave, can hardly have given five minutes
serious consideration to so outrageous a proposition. They cannot
have even made up their minds as to what they mean by love; for
when they expatiate on their thesis they are sometimes talking
about kindness, and sometimes about mere appetite. In either sense
they are equally far from the realities of life. No healthy man or
animal is occupied with love in any sense for more than a very
small fraction indeed of the time he devotes to business and to
recreations wholly unconnected with love. A wife entirely
preoccupied with her affection for her husband, a mother entirely
preoccupied with her affection for her children, may be all very
well in a book (for people who like that kind of book); but in
actual life she is a nuisance. Husbands may escape from her when
their business compels them to be away from home all day; but
young children may be, and quite often are, killed by her cuddling
and coddling and doctoring and preaching: above all, by her
continuous attempts to excite precocious sentimentality, a
practice as objectionable, and possibly as mischievous, as the
worst tricks of the worst nursemaids.


LARGE AND SMALL FAMILIES

In most healthy families there is a revolt against this tendency.
The exchanging of presents on birthdays and the like is barred by
general consent, and the relations of the parties are placed by
express treaty on an unsentimental footing.

Unfortunately this mitigation of family sentimentality is much
more characteristic of large families than small ones. It used to
be said that members of large families get on in the world; and it
is certainly true that for purposes of social training a household
of twenty surpasses a household of five as an Oxford College
surpasses an eight-roomed house in a cheap street. Ten children,
with the necessary adults, make a community in which an excess of
sentimentality is impossible. Two children make a doll's house, in
which both parents and children become morbid if they keep to
themselves. What is more, when large families were the fashion,
they were organized as tyrannies much more than as "atmospheres of
love." Francis Place tells us that he kept out of his father's way
because his father never passed a child within his reach without
striking it; and though the case was an extreme one, it was an
extreme that illustrated a tendency. Sir Walter Scott's father,
when his son incautiously expressed some relish for his porridge,
dashed a handful of salt into it with an instinctive sense that it
was his duty as a father to prevent his son enjoying himself.
Ruskin's mother gratified the sensual side of her maternal
passion, not by cuddling her son, but by whipping him when he fell
downstairs or was slack in learning the Bible off by heart; and
this grotesque safety-valve for voluptuousness, mischievous as it
was in many ways, had at least the advantage that the child did
not enjoy it and was not debauched by it, as he would have been by
transports of sentimentality.

But nowadays we cannot depend on these safeguards, such as they
were. We no longer have large families: all the families are too
small to give the children the necessary social training. The
Roman father is out of fashion; and the whip and the cane are
becoming discredited, not so much by the old arguments against
corporal punishment (sound as these were) as by the gradual
wearing away of the veil from the fact that flogging is a form of
debauchery. The advocate of flogging as a punishment is now
exposed to very disagreeable suspicions; and ever since Rousseau
rose to the effort of making a certain very ridiculous confession
on the subject, there has been a growing perception that child
whipping, even for the children themselves, is not always the
innocent and high-minded practice it professes to be. At all
events there is no getting away from the facts that families are
smaller than they used to be, and that passions which formerly
took effect in tyranny have been largely diverted into
sentimentality. And though a little sentimentality may be a very
good thing, chronic sentimentality is a horror, more dangerous,
because more possible, than the erotomania which we all condemn
when we are not thoughtlessly glorifying it as the ideal married
state.


THE GOSPEL OF LAODICEA

Let us try to get at the root error of these false domestic
doctrines. Why was it that the late Samuel Butler, with a
conviction that increased with his experience of life, preached
the gospel of Laodicea, urging people to be temperate in what they
called goodness as in everything else? Why is it that I, when I
hear some well-meaning person exhort young people to make it a
rule to do at least one kind action every day, feel very much as I
should if I heard them persuade children to get drunk at least
once every day? Apart from the initial absurdity of accepting as
permanent a state of things in which there would be in this
country misery enough to supply occasion for several thousand
million kind actions per annum, the effect on the character of the
doers of the actions would be so appalling, that one month of any
serious attempt to carry out such counsels would probably bring
about more stringent legislation against actions going beyond the
strict letter of the law in the way of kindness than we have now
against excess in the opposite direction.

There is no more dangerous mistake than the mistake of supposing
that we cannot have too much of a good thing. The truth is, an
immoderately good man is very much more dangerous than an
immoderately bad man: that is why Savonarola was burnt and John of
Leyden torn to pieces with red-hot pincers whilst multitudes of
unredeemed rascals were being let off with clipped ears, burnt
palms, a flogging, or a few years in the galleys. That is why
Christianity never got any grip of the world until it virtually
reduced its claims on the ordinary citizen's attention to a couple
of hours every seventh day, and let him alone on week-days. If the
fanatics who are preoccupied day in and day out with their
salvation were healthy, virtuous, and wise, the Laodiceanism of
the ordinary man might be regarded as a deplorable shortcoming;
but, as a matter of fact, no more frightful misfortune could
threaten us than a general spread of fanaticism. What people call
goodness has to be kept in check just as carefully as what they
call badness; for the human constitution will not stand very much
of either without serious psychological mischief, ending in
insanity or crime. The fact that the insanity may be privileged,
as Savonarola's was up to the point of wrecking the social life of
Florence, does not alter the case. We always hesitate to treat a
dangerously good man as a lunatic because he may turn out to be a
prophet in the true sense: that is, a man of exceptional sanity
who is in the right when we are in the wrong. However necessary it
may have been to get rid of Savonarola, it was foolish to poison
Socrates and burn St. Joan of Arc. But it is none the less
necessary to take a firm stand against the monstrous proposition
that because certain attitudes and sentiments may be heroic and
admirable at some momentous crisis, they should or can be
maintained at the same pitch continuously through life. A life
spent in prayer and alms giving is really as insane as a life
spent in cursing and picking pockets: the effect of everybody
doing it would be equally disastrous. The superstitious tolerance
so long accorded to monks and nuns is inevitably giving way to a
very general and very natural practice of confiscating their
retreats and expelling them from their country, with the result
that they come to England and Ireland, where they are partly
unnoticed and partly encouraged because they conduct technical
schools and teach our girls softer speech and gentler manners than
our comparatively ruffianly elementary teachers. But they are
still full of the notion that because it is possible for men to
attain the summit of Mont Blanc and stay there for an hour, it is
possible for them to live there. Children are punished and scolded
for not living there; and adults take serious offence if it is not
assumed that they live there.

As a matter of fact, ethical strain is just as bad for us as
physical strain. It is desirable that the normal pitch of conduct
at which men are not conscious of being particularly virtuous,
although they feel mean when they fall below it, should be raised
as high as possible; but it is not desirable that they should
attempt to live above this pitch any more than that they should
habitually walk at the rate of five miles an hour or carry a
hundredweight continually on their backs. Their normal condition
should be in nowise difficult or remarkable; and it is a
perfectly sound instinct that leads us to mistrust the good man as
much as the bad man, and to object to the clergyman who is pious
extra-professionally as much as to the professional pugilist who
is quarrelsome and violent in private life. We do not want good
men and bad men any more than we want giants and dwarfs. What we
do want is a high quality for our normal: that is, people who can
be much better than what we now call respectable without self-
sacrifice. Conscious goodness, like conscious muscular effort, may
be of use in emergencies; but for everyday national use it is
negligible; and its effect on the character of the individual may
easily be disastrous.


FOR BETTER FOR WORSE

It would be hard to find any document in practical daily use in
which these obvious truths seem so stupidly overlooked as they are
in the marriage service. As we have seen, the stupidity is only
apparent: the service was really only an honest attempt to make
the best of a commercial contract of property and slavery by
subjecting it to some religious restraint and elevating it by some
touch of poetry. But the actual result is that when two people are
under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most
delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to
swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and
exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. And
though of course nobody expects them to do anything so impossible
and so unwholesome, yet the law that regulates their relations,
and the public opinion that regulates that law, is actually
founded on the assumption that the marriage vow is not only
feasible but beautiful and holy, and that if they are false to it,
they deserve no sympathy and no relief. If all married people
really lived together, no doubt the mere force of facts would make
an end to this inhuman nonsense in a month, if not sooner; but it
is very seldom brought to that test. The typical British husband
sees much less of his wife than he does of his business partner,
his fellow clerk, or whoever works beside him day by day. Man and
wife do not as a rule, live together: they only breakfast
together, dine together, and sleep in the same room. In most cases
the woman knows nothing of the man's working life and he knows
nothing of her working life (he calls it her home life). It is
remarkable that the very people who romance most absurdly about
the closeness and sacredness of the marriage tie are also those
who are most convinced that the man's sphere and the woman's
sphere are so entirely separate that only in their leisure moments
can they ever be together. A man as intimate with his own wife as
a magistrate is with his clerk, or a Prime Minister with the
leader of the Opposition, is a man in ten thousand. The majority
of married couples never get to know one another at all: they only
get accustomed to having the same house, the same children, and
the same income, which is quite a different matter. The
comparatively few men who work at home--writers, artists, and to
some extent clergymen--have to effect some sort of segregation
within the house or else run a heavy risk of overstraining their
domestic relations. When the pair is so poor that it can afford
only a single room, the strain is intolerable: violent quarrelling
is the result. Very few couples can live in a single-roomed
tenement without exchanging blows quite frequently. In the
leisured classes there is often no real family life at all. The
boys are at a public school; the girls are in the schoolroom in
charge of a governess; the husband is at his club or in a set
which is not his wife's; and the institution of marriage enjoys
the credit of a domestic peace which is hardly more intimate than
the relations of prisoners in the same gaol or guests at the same
garden party. Taking these two cases of the single room and the
unearned income as the extremes, we might perhaps locate at a
guess whereabout on the scale between them any particular family
stands. But it is clear enough that the one-roomed end, though its
conditions enable the marriage vow to be carried out with the
utmost attainable exactitude, is far less endurable in practice,
and far more mischievous in its effect on the parties concerned,
and through them on the community, than the other end. Thus we see
that the revolt against marriage is by no means only a revolt
against its sordidness as a survival of sex slavery. It may even
plausibly be maintained that this is precisely the part of it that
works most smoothly in practice. The revolt is also against its
sentimentality, its romance, its Amorism, even against its
enervating happiness.


WANTED: AN IMMORAL STATESMAN

We now see that the statesman who undertakes to deal with marriage
will have to face an amazingly complicated public opinion. In
fact, he will have to leave opinion as far as possible out of the
question, and deal with human nature instead. For even if there
could be any real public opinion in a society like ours, which is
a mere mob of classes, each with its own habits and prejudices, it
would be at best a jumble of superstitions and interests, taboos
and hypocrisies, which could not be reconciled in any coherent
enactment. It would probably proclaim passionately that it does
not matter in the least what sort of children we have, or how few
or how many, provided the children are legitimate. Also that it
does not matter in the least what sort of adults we have, provided
they are married. No statesman worth the name can possibly act on
these views. He is bound to prefer one healthy illegitimate child
to ten rickety legitimate ones, and one energetic and capable
unmarried couple to a dozen inferior apathetic husbands and wives.
If it could be proved that illicit unions produce three children

each and marriages only one and a half, he would be bound to
encourage illicit unions and discourage and even penalize
marriage. The common notion that the existing forms of marriage
are not political contrivances, but sacred ethical obligations to
which everything, even the very existence of the human race, must
be sacrificed if necessary (and this is what the vulgar morality
we mostly profess on the subject comes to) is one on which no sane
Government could act for a moment; and yet it influences, or is
believed to influence, so many votes, that no Government will
touch the marriage question if it can possibly help it, even when
there is a demand for the extension of marriage, as in the case of
the recent long-delayed Act legalizing marriage with a deceased
wife's sister. When a reform in the other direction is needed (for
example, an extension of divorce), not even the existence of the
most unbearable hardships will induce our statesmen to move so
long as the victims submit sheepishly, though when they take the
remedy into their own hands an inquiry is soon begun. But what is
now making some action in the matter imperative is neither the
sufferings of those who are tied for life to criminals, drunkards,
physically unsound and dangerous mates, and worthless and
unamiable people generally, nor the immorality of the couples
condemned  to celibacy by separation orders which do not annul
their marriages, but the fall in the birth rate. Public opinion
will not help us out of this difficulty: on the contrary, it will,
if it be allowed, punish anybody who mentions it. When Zola tried
to repopulate France by writing a novel in praise of parentage,
the only comment made here was that the book could not possibly be
translated into English, as its subject was too improper.


THE LIMITS OF DEMOCRACY

Now if England had been governed in the past by statesmen willing
to be ruled by such public opinion as that, she would have been
wiped off the political map long ago. The modern notion that

democracy means governing a country according to the ignorance of
its majorities is never more disastrous than when there is some
question of sexual morals to be dealt with. The business of a
democratic statesman is not, as some of us seem to think, to
convince the voters that he knows no better than they as to the
methods of attaining their common ends, but on the contrary to
convince them that he knows much better than they do, and
therefore differs from them on every possible question of method.
The voter's duty is to take care that the Government consists of
men whom he can trust to devize or support institutions making for
the common welfare. This is highly skilled work; and to be
governed by people who set about it as the man in the street would
set about it is to make straight for "red ruin and the breaking up
of laws." Voltaire said that Mr Everybody is wiser than anybody;
and whether he is or not, it is his will that must prevail; but
the will and the way are two very different things. For example,
it is the will of the people on a hot day that the means of relief
from the effects of the heat should be within the reach of
everybody. Nothing could be more innocent, more  hygienic, more
important to the social welfare. But the way of the people on such
occasions is mostly to drink large quantities of beer, or, among
the more luxurious classes, iced claret cup, lemon squashes, and
the like. To take a moral illustration, the will to suppress
misconduct and secure efficiency in work is general and salutary;
but the notion that the best and only effective way is by
complaining, scolding, punishing, and revenging is equally
general. When Mrs Squeers opened an abscess on her pupil's head
with an inky penknife, her object was entirely laudable: her heart
was in the right place: a statesman interfering with her on the
ground that he did not want the boy cured would have deserved
impeachment for gross tyranny. But a statesman tolerating amateur
surgical practice with inky penknives in school would be a very
bad Minister of Education. It is on the question of method that
your expert comes in; and though I am democrat enough to insist
that he must first convince a representative body of amateurs that
his way is the right way and Mrs Squeers's way the wrong way, yet
I very strongly object to any tendency to flatter Mrs Squeers into
the belief that her way is in the least likely to be the right
way, or that any other test is to be applied to it except the test
of its effect on human welfare.


THE SCIENCE AND ART OF POLITICS

Political Science means nothing else than the devizing of the best
ways of fulfilling the will of the world; and, I repeat, it is
skilled work. Once the way is discovered, the methods laid down,
and the machinery provided, the work of the statesman is done, and
that of the official begins. To illustrate, there is no need for
the police officer who governs the street traffic to be or to know
any better than the people who obey the wave of his hand. All
concerted action involves subordination and the appointment of
directors at whose signal the others will act. There is no more
need for them to be superior to the rest than for the keystone of
an arch to be of harder stone than the coping. But when it comes
to devizing the directions which are to be obeyed: that is, to
making new institutions and scraping old ones, then you need
aristocracy in the sense of government by the best. A military
state organized so as to carry out exactly the impulses of the
average soldier would not last a year. The result of trying to
make the Church of England reflect the notions of the average
churchgoer has reduced it to a cipher except for the purposes of a
petulantly irreligious social and political club. Democracy as to
the thing to be done may be inevitable (hence the vital need for a
democracy of supermen); but democracy as to the way to do it is
like letting the passengers drive the train: it can only end in
collision and wreck. As a matter of act, we obtain reforms (such
as they are), not by allowing the electorate to draft statutes,
but by persuading it that a certain minister and his cabinet are
gifted with sufficient political sagacity to find out how to
produce the desired result. And the usual penalty of taking
advantage of this power to reform our institutions is defeat by a
vehement "swing of the pendulum" at the next election. Therein
lies the peril and the glory of democratic statesmanship. A
statesman who confines himself to popular legislation--or, for the
matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular
plays--is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever the blind man
pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same
place.


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
antiSocialist 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.


THE PERSONAL SENTIMENTAL BASIS OF MONOGAMY

Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the
political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the
sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or
every hour Physically there is nothing to distinguish human

society from the farm-yard except that children are more
troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and
women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly,
the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-
quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the
slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly
demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of
more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be
distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of
freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more
liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself
provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a
product of slavery and not of liberty.

The solid foundation of their confidence is the fact that the
relationship set up by a comfortable marriage is so intimate and
so persuasive of the whole life of the parties to it, that nobody
has room in his or her life for more than one such relationship at
a time. What is called a household of three is never really of
three except in the sense that every household becomes a household
of three when a child is born, and may in the same way become a
household of four or fourteen if the union be fertile enough. Now
no doubt the marriage tie means so little to some people that the
addition to the household of half a dozen more wives or husbands
would be as possible as the addition of half a dozen governesses
or tutors or visitors or servants. A Sultan may have fifty wives
as easily as he may have fifty dishes on his table, because in the
English sense he has no wives at all; nor have his wives any
husband: in short, he is not what we call a married man. And there
are sultans and sultanas and seraglios existing in England under
English forms. But when you come to the real modern marriage of
sentiment, a relation is created which has never to my knowledge
been shared by three persons except when all three have been
extraordinarily fond of one another. Take for example the famous
case of Nelson and Sir William and Lady Hamilton. The secret of
this household of three was not only that both the husband and
Nelson were devoted to Lady Hamilton, but that they were also
apparently devoted to one another. When Hamilton died both Nelson
and Emma seem to have been equally heartbroken. When there is a
successful household of one man and two women the same unusual
condition is fulfilled: the two women not only cannot live happily
without the man but cannot live happily without each other. In
every other case known to me, either from observation or record,
the experiment is a hopeless failure: one of the two rivals for
the really intimate affection of the third inevitably drives out
the other. The driven-out party may accept the situation and
remain in the house as a friend to save appearances, or for the
sake of the children, or for economic reasons; but such an
arrangement can subsist only when the forfeited relation is no
longer really valued; and this indifference, like the triple bond
of affection which carried Sir William Hamilton through, is so
rare as to be practicably negligible in the establishment of a
conventional morality of marriage. Therefore sensible and
experienced people always assume that when a declaration of love
is made to an already married person, the declaration binds the
parties in honor never to see one another again unless they
contemplate divorce and remarriage. And this is a sound
convention, even for unconventional people. Let me illustrate by
reference to a fictitious case: the one imagined in my own play
Candida will do as well as another. Here a young man who has been
received as a friend into the house of a clergyman falls in love
with the clergyman's wife, and, being young and  inexperienced,
declares his feelings, and claims that he, and not the clergyman,
is the more suitable mate for the lady. The clergyman, who has a
temper, is first tempted to hurl the youth into the street by
bodily violence: an impulse natural, perhaps, but vulgar and
improper, and, not open, on consideration, to decent men. Even
coarse and inconsiderate men are restrained from it by the fact
that the sympathy of the woman turns naturally to the victim of
physical brutality and against the bully, the Thackerayan notion
to the contrary being one of the illusions of literary
masculinity. Besides, the husband is not necessarily the stronger
man: an appeal to force has resulted in the ignominious defeat of
the husband quite as often as in poetic justice as conceived in
the conventional novelet. What an honorable and sensible man does
when his household is invaded is what the Reverend James Mavor
Morell does in my play. He recognizes that just as there is not
room for two women in that sacredly intimate relation of
sentimental domesticity which is what marriage means to him, so
there is no room for two men in that relation with his wife; and
he accordingly tells her firmly that she must choose which man
will occupy the place that is large enough for one only. He is so
far shrewdly unconventional as to recognize that if she chooses
the other man, he must give way, legal tie or no legal tie; but he
knows that either one or the other must go. And a sensible wife
would act in the same way. If a romantic young lady came into
her house and proposed to adore her husband on a tolerated
footing, she would say "My husband has not room in his life for
two wives: either you go out of the house or I go out of it." The
situation is not at all unlikely: I had almost said not at all
unusual. Young ladies and gentlemen in the greensickly condition
which is called calf-love, associating with married couples at
dangerous periods of mature life, quite often find themselves
in it; and the extreme reluctance of proud and sensitive people to
avoid any assertion of matrimonial rights, or to condescend to
jealousy, sometimes makes the threatened husband or wife hesitate
to take prompt steps and do the apparently conventional thing. But
whether they hesitate or act the result is always the same. In a
real marriage of sentiment the wife or husband cannot be
supplanted by halves; and such a marriage will break very soon
under the strain of polygyny or polyandry. What we want at present
is a sufficiently clear teaching of this fact to ensure that
prompt and decisive action shall always be taken in such cases
without any false shame of seeming conventional (a shame to
which people capable of such real marriage are specially
susceptible), and a rational divorce law to enable the
marriage to be dissolved and the parties honorably resorted
and recoupled without disgrace and scandal if that should prove
the proper solution.

It must be repeated here that no law, however stringent, can
prevent polygamy among groups of people who choose to live loosely
and be monogamous only in appearance. But such cases are not now
under consideration. Also, affectionate husbands like Samuel
Pepys, and affectionate wives of the corresponding temperaments
may, it appears, engage in transient casual adventures out of
doors without breaking up their home life. But within doors that
home life may be regarded as naturally monogamous. It does not
need to be protected against polygamy: it protects itself.


DIVORCE

All this has an important bearing on the question of divorce.
Divorce reformers are so much preoccupied with the injustice of
forbidding a woman to divorce her husband for unfaithfulness to
his marriage vow, whilst allowing him that power over her, that
they are apt to overlook the pressing need for admitting other and
far more important grounds for divorce. If we take a document like
Pepys' Diary, we learn that a woman may have an incorrigibly
unfaithful husband, and yet be much better off than if she had an
ill-tempered, peevish, maliciously sarcastic one, or was chained
for life to a criminal, a drunkard, a lunatic, an idle vagrant, or
a person whose religious faith was contrary to her own. Imagine
being married to a liar, a borrower, a mischief maker, a teaser or
tormentor of children and animals, or even simply to a bore!
Conceive yourself tied for life to one of the perfectly "faithful"
husbands who are sentenced to a month's imprisonment occasionally
for idly leaving their wives in childbirth without food, fire, or
attendance! What woman would not rather marry ten Pepyses? what
man a dozen Nell Gwynnes? Adultery, far from being the first and
only ground for divorce, might more reasonably be made the last,
or wholly excluded. The present law is perfectly logical only if
you once admit (as no decent person ever does) its fundamental
assumption that there can be no companionship between men and
women because the woman has a "sphere" of her own, that of
housekeeping, in which the man must not meddle, whilst he has all
the rest of human activity for his sphere: the only point at which
the two spheres touch being that of replenishing the population.
On this assumption the man naturally asks for a guarantee that the
children shall be his because he has to find the money to support
them. The power of divorcing a woman for adultery is this
guarantee, a guarantee that she does not need to protect her
against a similar imposture on his part, because he cannot bear
children. No doubt he can spend the money that ought to be spent
on her children on another woman and her children; but this is
desertion, which is a separate matter. The fact for us to seize is
that in the eye of the law, adultery without consequences is
merely a sentimental grievance, whereas the planting on one man of
another man's offspring is a substantial one. And so, no doubt, it
is; but the day has gone by for basing laws on the assumption that
a woman is less to a man than his dog, and thereby encouraging and
accepting the standards of the husbands who buy meat for their
bull-pups and leave their wives and children hungry. That basis is
the penalty we pay for having borrowed our religion from the East,
instead of building up a religion of our own out of our western
inspiration and western sentiment. The result is that we all
believe that our religion is on its last legs, whereas the truth
is that it is not yet born, though the age walks visibly pregnant
with it. Meanwhile, as women are dragged down by their oriental
servitude to our men, and as, further, women drag down those who
degrade them quite as effectually as men do, there are moments
when it is difficult to see anything in our sex institutions
except a police des moeurs keeping the field for a competition as
to which sex shall corrupt the other most.


IMPORTANCE OF SENTIMENTAL GRIEVANCE

Any tolerable western divorce law must put the sentimental
grievances first, and should carefully avoid singling out any
ground of divorce in such a way as to create a convention that
persons having that ground are bound in honor to avail themselves
of it. It is generally admitted that people should not be
encouraged to petition for a divorce in a fit of petulance. What
is not so clearly seen is that neither should they be encouraged
to petition in a fit of jealousy, which is certainly the most
detestable and mischievous of all the passions that enjoy public
credit. Still less should people who are not jealous be urged to
behave as if they were jealous, and to enter upon duels and
divorce suits in which they have no desire to be successful. There
should be no publication of the grounds on which a divorce is
sought or granted; and as this would abolish the only means the
public now has of ascertaining that every possible effort has been
made to keep the couple united against their wills, such privacy
will only be tolerated when we at last admit that the sole and
sufficient reason why people should be granted a divorce is that
they want one. Then there will be no more reports of divorce
cases, no more letters read in court with an indelicacy that makes
every sensitive person shudder and recoil as from a profanation,
no more washing of household linen, dirty or clean, in public.
We must learn in these matters to mind our own business and not
impose our individual notions of propriety on one another, even if
it carries us to the length of openly admitting what we are now
compelled to assume silently, that every human being has a right
to sexual experience, and that the law is concerned only with
parentage, which is now a separate matter.


DIVORCE WITHOUT ASKING WHY

The one question that should never be put to a petitioner for
divorce is "Why?" When a man appeals to a magistrate for
protection from someone who threatens to kill him, on the simple
ground that he desires to live, the magistrate might quite
reasonably ask him why he desires to live, and why the person who
wishes to kill him should not be gratified. Also whether he can
prove that his life is a pleasure to himself or a benefit to
anyone else, and whether it is good for him to be encouraged to
exaggerate the importance of his short span in this vale of tears
rather than to keep himself constantly ready to meet his God.

The only reason for not raising these very weighty points is that
we find society unworkable except on the assumption that every man
has a natural right to live. Nothing short of his own refusal to
respect that right in others can reconcile the community to
killing him. From this fundamental right many others are derived.
The American Constitution, one of the few modern political
documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest
circumstances to think out what they really had to face instead of
chopping logic in a university classroom, specifies "liberty and
the pursuit of happiness" as natural rights. The terms are too
vague to be of much practical use; for the supreme right to life,
extended as it now must be to the life of the race, and to the
quality of life as well as to the mere fact of breathing, is
making short work of many ancient liberties, and exposing the
pursuit of happiness as perhaps the most miserable of human
occupations. Nevertheless, the American Constitution roughly
expresses the conditions to which modern democracy commits us. To
impose marriage on two unmarried people who do not desire to marry
one another would be admittedly an act of enslavement. But it is
no worse than to impose a continuation of marriage on people who
have ceased to desire to be married. It will be said that the
parties may not agree on that; that one may desire to maintain the
marriage the other wishes to dissolve. But the same hardship
arises whenever a man in love proposes marriage to a woman and is
refused. The refusal is so painful to him that he often threatens
to kill himself and sometimes even does it. Yet we expect him to
face his ill luck, and never dream of forcing the woman to accept
him. His case is the same as that of the husband whose wife tells
him she no longer cares for him, and desires the marriage to be
dissolved. You will say, perhaps, if you are superstitious, that
it is not the same--that marriage makes a difference. You are
wrong: there is no magic in marriage. If there were, married
couples would never desire to separate. But they do. And when they
do, it is simple slavery to compel them to remain together.


ECONOMIC SLAVERY AGAIN THE ROOT DIFFICULTY

The husband, then, is to be allowed to discard his wife when he is
tired of her, and the wife the husband when another man strikes
her fancy? One must reply unhesitatingly in the affirmative; for
if we are to deny every proposition that can be stated in
offensive terms by its opponents, we shall never be able to affirm
anything at all. But the question reminds us that until the
economic independence of women is achieved, we shall have to
remain impaled on the other horn of the dilemma and maintain
marriage as a slavery. And here let me ask the Government of the
day (1910) a question with regard to the Labor Exchanges it has
very wisely established throughout the country. What do these
Exchanges do when a woman enters and states that her occupation is
that of a wife and mother; that she is out of a job; and that she
wants an employer? If the Exchanges refuse to entertain her
application, they are clearly excluding nearly the whole female
sex from the benefit of the Act. If not, they must become
matrimonial agencies, unless, indeed, they are prepared to become
something worse by putting the woman down as a housekeeper and
introducing her to an employer without making marriage a condition
of the hiring.


LABOR EXCHANGES AND THE WHITE SLAVERY

Suppose, again, a woman presents herself at the Labor Exchange,
and states her trade as that of a White Slave, meaning the
unmentionable trade pursued by many thousands of women in all
civilized cities. Will the Labor Exchange find employers for her?
If not, what will it do with her? If it throws her back destitute
and unhelped on the streets to starve, it might as well not exist
as far as she is concerned; and the problem of unemployment
remains unsolved at its most painful point. Yet if it finds honest
employment for her and for all the unemployed wives and mothers,
it must find new places in the world for women; and in so doing it
must achieve for them economic independence of men. And when this
is done, can we feel sure that any woman will consent to be a wife
and mother (not to mention the less respectable alternative)
unless her position is made as eligible as that of the women for
whom the Labor Exchanges are finding independent work? Will not
many women now engaged in domestic work under circumstances
which make it repugnant to them, abandon it and seek employment
under other circumstances? As unhappiness in marriage is almost
the only discomfort sufficiently irksome to induce a woman to
break up her home, and economic dependence the only compulsion
sufficiently stringent to force her to endure such unhappiness,
the solution of the problem of finding independent employment
for women may cause a great number of childless unhappy marriages
to break up spontaneously, whether the marriage laws are altered
or not. And here we must extend the term childless marriages to
cover households in which the children have grown up and gone
their own way, leaving the parents alone together: a point at
which many worthy couples discover for the first time that they
have long since lost interest in one another, and have been united
only by a common interest in their children. We may expect, then,
that marriages which are maintained by economic pressure alone
will dissolve when that pressure is removed; and as all the
parties to them will certainly not accept a celibate life, the law
must sanction the dissolution in order to prevent a recurrence of
the scandal which has moved the Government to appoint the
Commission now sitting to investigate the marriage question: the
scandal, that is, of a great number  matter of the evils of our
marriage law, to take care of the pence and let the pounds take
care of themselves. The crimes and diseases of marriage will force
themselves on public attention by their own virulence. I mention
them here only because they reveal certain habits of thought and
feeling with regard to marriage of which we must rid ourselves if
we are to act sensibly when we take the necessary reforms in hand.


CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE

First among these is the habit of allowing ourselves to be bound
not only by the truths of the Christian religion but by the
excesses and extravagances which the Christian movement acquired
in its earlier days as a violent reaction against what it still
calls paganism. By far the most dangerous of these, because it is
a blasphemy against life, and, to put it in Christian terms, an
accusation of indecency against God, is the notion that sex, with
all its operations, is in itself absolutely an obscene thing, and
that an immaculate conception is a miracle. So unwholesome an
absurdity could only have gained ground under two conditions: one,
a reaction against a society in which sensual luxury had been
carried to revolting extremes, and, two, a belief that the world
was coming to an end, and that therefore sex was no longer a
necessity. Christianity, because it began under these conditions,
made sexlessness and Communism the two main practical articles of
its propaganda; and it has never quite lost its original bias in
these directions. In spite of the putting off of the Second Coming
from the lifetime of the apostles to the millennium, and of the
great disappointment of the year 1000 A.D., in which multitudes of
Christians seriously prepared for the end of the world, the
prophet who announces that the end is at hand is still popular.
Many of the people who ridicule his demonstrations that the
fantastic monsters of the book of Revelation are among us in the
persons of our own political contemporaries, and who proceed
sanely in all their affairs on the assumption that the world is
going to last, really do believe that there will be a Judgment
Day, and that it MIGHT even be in their own time. A thunderstorm,
an eclipse, or any very unusual weather will make them
apprehensive and uncomfortable.

This explains why, for a long time, the Christian Church refused
to have anything to do with marriage. The result was, not the
abolition of sex, but its excommunication. And, of course, the
consequences of persuading people that matrimony was an unholy
state were so grossly carnal, that the Church had to execute a
complete right-about-face, and try to make people understand that
it was a holy state: so holy indeed that it could not be validly
inaugurated without the blessing of the Church. And by this
teaching it did something to atone for its earlier blasphemy. But
the mischief of chopping and changing your doctrine to meet this
or that practical emergency instead of keeping it adjusted to the
whole scheme of life, is that you end by having half-a-dozen
contradictory doctrines to suit half-a-dozen different
emergencies. The Church solemnized and sanctified marriage without
ever giving up its original Pauline doctrine on the subject. And
it soon fell into another confusion. At the point at which it took
up marriage and endeavored to make it holy, marriage was, as it
still is, largely a survival of the custom of selling women to
men. Now in all trades a marked difference is made in price
between a new article and a second-hand one. The moment we meet
with this difference in value between human beings, we may know
that we are in the slave-market, where the conception of our
relations to the persons sold is neither religious nor natural nor
human nor superhuman, but simply commercial. The Church, when
it finally gave its blessing to marriage, did not, in its
innocence, fathom these commercial traditions. Consequently it
tried to sanctify them too, with grotesque results. The slave-
dealer having always asked more money for virginity, the Church,
instead of detecting the money-changer and driving him out of the
temple, took him for a sentimental and chivalrous lover, and,
helped by its only half-discarded doctrine of celibacy, gave
virginity a heavenly value to ennoble its commercial pretensions.
In short, Mammon, always mighty, put the Church in his pocket,
where he keeps it to this day, in spite of the occasional saints
and martyrs who contrive from time to time to get their heads and
souls free to testify against him.


DIVORCE A SACRAMENTAL DUTY

But Mammon overreached himself when he tried to impose his
doctrine of inalienable property on the Church under the guise of
indissoluble marriage. For the Church tried to shelter this
inhuman doctrine and flat contradiction of the gospel by claiming,
and rightly claiming, that marriage is a sacrament. So it is; but
that is exactly what makes divorce a duty when the marriage has
lost the inward and spiritual grace of which the marriage ceremony
is the outward and visible sign. In vain do bishops stoop to pick
up the discarded arguments of the atheists of fifty years ago by
pleading that the words of Jesus were in an obscure Aramaic
dialect, and were probably misunderstood, as Jesus, they think,
could not have said anything a bishop would disapprove of. Unless
they are prepared to add that the statement that those who take
the sacrament with their lips but not with their hearts eat and
drink their own damnation is also a mistranslation from the
Aramaic, they are most solemnly bound to shield marriage from
profanation, not merely by permitting divorce, but by making it
compulsory in certain cases as the Chinese do.

When the great protest of the XVI century came, and the Church was
reformed in several countries, the Reformation was so largely a
rebellion against sacerdotalism that marriage was very nearly
excommunicated again: our modern civil marriage, round which so
many fierce controversies and political conflicts have raged,
would have been thoroughly approved of by Calvin, and hailed with
relief by Luther. But the instinctive doctrine that there is
something holy and mystic in sex, a doctrine which many of us now
easily dissociate from any priestly ceremony, but which in those
days seemed to all who felt it to need a ritual affirmation, could
not be thrown on the scrap-heap with the sale of Indulgences
and the like; and so the Reformation left marriage where it was: a
curious mixture of commercial sex slavery, early Christian sex
abhorrence, and later Christian sex sanctification.


OTHELLO AND DESDEMONA

How strong was the feeling that a husband or a wife is an article
of property, greatly depreciated in value at second-hand, and not
to be used or touched by any person but the proprietor, may be
learnt from Shakespear. His most infatuated and passionate lovers
are Antony and Othello; yet both of them betray the commercial and
proprietary instinct the moment they lose their tempers. "I found
you," says Antony, reproaching Cleopatra, "as a morsel cold upon
dead Caesar's trencher." Othello's worst agony is the thought of
"keeping a corner in the thing he loves for others' uses." But
this is not what a man feels about the thing he loves, but about
the thing he owns. I never understood the full significance of
Othello's outburst until I one day heard a lady, in the
course of a private discussion as to the feasibility of "group
marriage," say with cold disgust that she would as soon think of
lending her toothbrush to another woman as her husband. The sense
of outraged manhood with which I felt myself and all other
husbands thus reduced to the rank of a toilet appliance gave me a
very unpleasant taste of what Desdemona might have felt had
she overheard Othello's outburst. I was so dumfounded that I had
not the presence of mind to ask the lady whether she insisted on
having a doctor, a nurse, a dentist, and even a priest and
solicitor all to herself as well. But I had too often heard men
speak of women as if they were mere personal conveniences to feel
surprised that exactly the same view is held, only more
fastidiously, by women.

All these views must be got rid of before we can have any healthy
public opinion (on which depends our having a healthy population)
on the subject of sex, and consequently of marriage. Whilst the
subject is considered shameful and sinful we shall have no
systematic instruction in sexual hygiene, because such lectures as
are given in Germany, France, and even prudish America (where
the great Miltonic tradition in this matter still lives) will be
considered a corruption of that youthful innocence which now
subsists on nasty stories and whispered traditions handed down
from generation to generation of school-children: stories and
traditions which conceal nothing of sex but its dignity, its
honor, its sacredness, its rank as the first necessity of society
and the deepest concern of the nation. We shall continue to
maintain the White Slave Trade and protect its exploiters by, on
the one hand, tolerating the white slave as the necessary
breakwater of marriage; and, on the other, trampling on her and
degrading her until she has nothing to hope from our Courts; and
so, with policemen at every corner, and law triumphant all over
Europe, she will still be smuggled and cattle-driven from one end
of the civilized world to the other, cheated, beaten, bullied, and
hunted into the streets to disgusting overwork, without daring to
utter the cry for help that brings, not rescue, but exposure and
infamy, yet revenging herself terribly in the end by scattering
blindness and sterility, pain and disfigurement, insanity and
death among us with the certainty that we are much too pious and
genteel to allow such things to be mentioned with a view to saving
either her or ourselves from them. And all the time we shall
keep enthusiastically investing her trade with every
allurement that the art of the novelist, the playwright, the
dancer, the milliner, the painter, the limelight man, and the
sentimental poet can devize, after which we shall continue to be
very much shocked and surprised when the cry of the youth, of the
young wife, of the mother, of the infected nurse, and of all the
other victims, direct and indirect, arises with its invariable
refrain: "Why did nobody warn me?"


WHAT IS TO BECOME OF THE CHILDREN?

I must not reply flippantly, Make them all Wards in Chancery; yet
that would be enough to put any sensible person on the track of
the reply. One would think, to hear the way in which people
sometimes ask the question, that not only does marriage prevent
the difficulty from ever arising, but that nothing except divorce
can ever raise it. It is true that if you divorce the parents, the
children have to be disposed of. But if you hang the parents, or
imprison the parents, or take the children out of the custody of
the parents because they hold Shelley's opinions, or if the
parents die, the same difficulty arises. And as these things have
happened again and again, and as we have had plenty of experience
of divorce decrees and separation orders, the attempt to use
children as an obstacle to divorce is hardly worth arguing with.
We shall deal with the children just as we should deal with them
if their homes were broken up by any other cause. There is a sense
in which children are a real obstacle to divorce: they give
parents a common interest which keeps together many a couple who,
if childless, would separate. The marriage law is superfluous in
such cases. This is shewn by the fact that the proportion of
childless divorces is much larger than the proportion of divorces
from all causes. But it must not be forgotten that the interest of
the children forms one of the most powerful arguments for divorce.
An unhappy household is a bad nursery. There is something to be
said for the polygynous or polyandrous household as a school for
children: children really do suffer from having too few parents:
this is why uncles and aunts and tutors and governesses are often
so good for children. But it is just the polygamous household
which our marriage law allows to be broken up, and which, as we
have seen, is not possible as a typical institution in a
democratic country where the numbers of the sexes are about equal.
Therefore polygyny and polyandry as a means of educating children
fall to the ground, and with them, I think, must go the opinion
which has been expressed by Gladstone and others, that an
extension of divorce, whilst admitting many new grounds for it,
might exclude the ground of adultery. There are, however, clearly
many things that make some of our domestic interiors little
private hells for children (especially when the children are quite
content in them) which would justify any intelligent State in
breaking up the home and giving the custody of the children either
to the parent whose conscience had revolted against the
corruption of the children, or to neither.

Which brings me to the point that divorce should no longer be
confined to cases in which one of the parties petitions for it.
If, for instance, you have a thoroughly rascally couple making a
living by infamous means and bringing up their children to their
trade, the king's proctor, instead of pursuing his present purely
mischievous function of preventing couples from being divorced
by proving that they both desire it, might very well intervene and
divorce these children from their parents. At present, if the
Queen herself were to rescue some unfortunate child from
degradation and misery and place her in a respectable home, and
some unmentionable pair of blackguards claimed the child and
proved that they were its father and mother, the child would be
given to them in the name of the sanctity of the home and the
holiness of parentage, after perpetrating which crime the law
would calmly send an education officer to take the child out of
the parents' hands several hours a day in the still more sacred
name of compulsory education. (Of course what would really happen
would be that the couple would blackmail the Queen for their
consent to the salvation of the child, unless, indeed, a hint from
a police inspector convinced them that bad characters cannot
always rely on pedantically constitutional treatment when they
come into conflict with persons in high station).

The truth is, not only must the bond between man and wife be made
subject to a reasonable consideration of the welfare of the
parties concerned and of the community, but the whole family bond
as well. The theory that the wife is the property of the husband
or the husband of the wife is not a whit less abhorrent and
mischievous than the theory that the child is the property of the
parent. Parental bondage will go the way of conjugal bondage:
indeed the order of reform should rather be put the other way
about; for the helplessness of children has already compelled the
State to intervene between parent and child more than between
husband and wife. If you pay less than 40 pounds a year rent, you will
sometimes feel tempted to say to the vaccination officer, the
school attendance officer, and the sanitary inspector: "Is this
child mine or yours?" The answer is that as the child is a vital
part of the nation, the nation cannot afford to leave it at the
irresponsible disposal of any individual or couple of individuals
as a mere small parcel of private property. The only solid ground
that the parent can take is that as the State, in spite of its
imposing name, can, when all is said, do nothing with the child
except place it in the charge of some human being or another,
the parent is no worse a custodian than a stranger. And though
this proposition may seem highly questionable at first sight to
those who imagine that only parents spoil children, yet those who
realize that children are as often spoilt by severity and coldness
as by indulgence, and that the notion that natural parents are any
worse than adopted parents is probably as complete an illusion as
the notion that they are any better, see no serious likelihood
that State action will detach children from their parents more
than it does at present: nay, it is even likely that the present
system of taking the children out of the parents' hands and having
the parental duty performed by officials, will, as poverty and
ignorance become the exception instead of the rule, give way to
the system of simply requiring certain results, beginning with the
baby's weight and ending perhaps with some sort of practical arts
degree, but leaving parents and children to achieve the results as
they best may. Such freedom is, of course, impossible in our
present poverty-stricken circumstances. As long as the masses of
our people are too poor to be good parents or good anything else
except beasts of burden, it is no use requiring much more from
them but hewing of wood and drawing of water: whatever is to be
done must be done FOR them mostly, alas! by people whose
superiority is merely technical. Until we abolish poverty it is
impossible to push rational measures of any kind very far: the
wolf at the door will compel us to live in a state of siege and to
do everything by a bureaucratic martial law that would be quite
unnecessary and indeed intolerable in a prosperous community. But
however we settle the question, we must make the parent justify
his custody of the child exactly as we should make a stranger
justify it. If a family is not achieving the purposes of a family
it should be dissolved just as a marriage should when it, too, is
not achieving the purposes of marriage. The notion that there is
or ever can be anything magical and inviolable in the legal
relations of domesticity, and the curious confusion of ideas which
makes some of our bishops imagine that in the phrase "Whom God
hath joined," the word God means the district registrar or the
Reverend John Smith or William Jones, must be got rid of. Means
of breaking up undesirable families are as necessary to the
preservation of the family as means of dissolving undesirable
marriages are to the preservation of marriage. If our domestic
laws are kept so inhuman that they at last provoke a furious
general insurrection against them as they already provoke many
private ones, we shall in a very literal sense empty the baby out
with the bath by abolishing an institution which needs nothing
more than a little obvious and easy rationalizing to make it not
only harmless but comfortable, honorable, and useful.


THE COST OF DIVORCE

But please do not imagine that the evils of indissoluble marriage
can be cured by divorce laws administered on our present plan. The
very cheapest undefended divorce, even when conducted by a
solicitor for its own sake and that of humanity, costs at least 30
pounds out-of-pocket expenses. To a client on business terms it
costs about three times as much. Until divorce is as cheap as
marriage, marriage will remain indissoluble for all except the
handful of people to whom 100 pounds is a procurable sum. For the
enormous majority of us there is no difference in this respect
between a hundred and a quadrillion. Divorce is the one thing you
may not sue for in forma pauperis.

Let me, then, recommend as follows:

1. Make divorce as easy, as cheap, and as private as marriage.

2. Grant divorce at the request of either party, whether the other
consents or not; and admit no other ground than the request, which
should be made without stating any reasons.

3. Confine the power of dissolving marriage for misconduct to the
State acting on the petition of the king's proctor or other
suitable functionary, who may, however, be moved by either party
to intervene in ordinary request cases, not to prevent the divorce
taking place, but to enforce alimony if it be refused and the case
is one which needs it.

4. Make it impossible for marriage to be used as a punishment as
it is at present. Send the husband and wife to penal servitude if
you disapprove of their conduct and want to punish them; but do
not send them back to perpetual wedlock.

5. If, on the other hand, you think a couple perfectly innocent
and well conducted, do not condemn them also to perpetual wedlock
against their wills, thereby making the treatment of what you
consider innocence on both sides the same as the treatment of what
you consider guilt on both sides.

6. Place the work of a wife and mother on the same footing as
other work: that is, on the footing of labor worthy of its hire;
and provide for unemployment in it exactly as for unemployment in
shipbuilding or an other recognized bread-winning trade.

7. And take and deal with all the consequences of these acts of
justice instead of letting yourself be frightened out of reason
and good sense by fear of consequences. We must finally adapt our
institutions to human nature. In the long run our present plan of
trying to force human nature into a mould of existing abuses,
superstitions, and corrupt interests, produces the explosive
forces that wreck civilization.

8. Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your
religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without
either law or religion. If you doubt this, ask any decent judge or
bishop. Do NOT ask somebody who does not know what a judge is, or
what a bishop is, or what the law is, or what religion is. In
other words, do not ask your newspaper. Journalists are too poorly
paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.


CONCLUSIONS

To sum up, we have to depend on the solution of the problem of
unemployment, probably on the principles laid down in the Minority
Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, to make the sexual
relations between men and women decent and honorable by making
women economically independent of men, and (in the younger son
section of the upper classes) men economically independent of
women. We also have to bring ourselves into line with the rest of
Protestant civilization by providing means for dissolving all
unhappy, improper, and inconvenient marriages. And, as it is our
cautious custom to lag behind the rest of the world to see how
their experiments in reform turn out before venturing ourselves,
and then take advantage of their experience to get ahead of them,
we should recognize that the ancient system of specifying grounds
for divorce, such as adultery, cruelty, drunkenness, felony,
insanity, vagrancy, neglect to provide for wife and children,
desertion, public defamation, violent temper, religious
heterodoxy, contagious disease, outrages, indignities, personal
abuse, "mental anguish," conduct rendering life burdensome and so
forth (all these are examples from some code actually in force at
present), is a mistake, because the only effect of compelling
people to plead and prove misconduct is that cases are
manufactured and clean linen purposely smirched and washed in
public, to the great distress and disgrace of innocent children
and relatives, whilst the grounds have at the same time to be made
so general that any sort of human conduct may be brought within
them by a little special pleading and a little mental reservation
on the part of witnesses examined on oath. When it conies to
"conduct rendering life burdensome," it is clear that no marriage
is any longer indissoluble; and the sensible thing to do then is
to grant divorce whenever it is desired, without asking why.
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