"He hated woman, hated her unconsciously and instinctively despised her. He often repeated to himself the words of Christ: 'Woman, what have I to do with thee?' And he would add, 'It seems as if God Himself felt discontented with that particular creation.' For him was that child of whom the poet speaks, impure, through and through impure. She was the temptress who had led away the first man, and still continued her work of perdition; a frail creature but dangerous, mysteriously disturbing. And even more than their sinful bodies he hated their loving souls.... God, in his opinion, had created woman solely to tempt man, to put him to the proof."
One lesson women and men have to learn: so easy to be put into words, so difficult to carry out by deeds. To get good from each other the sexes must give love the one to the other. The human heart in loneliness eats out itself, causes its own emptiness, creates its own terrors. Nature gives lavishly, wantonly, and woman is nearer to Nature than man is, therefore she must give the more freely, the more generously. There can be no such thing as the goodness of one-half of life without the goodness of the other half. Love between woman and man is mutual; is continual giving. Not by storing up for the good of one sex or in waste for the pleasure of the other, but by free bestowing is salvation. Wherefore, not in the enforced chastity of woman, but in her love, will man gain his new redemption.
FOOTNOTES:
[318] Velazquez is known to us only by the name of his mother; his father's name was de Silva.
[319] I have taken these passages from the chapter on "The Women of Galicia," in my Spain Revisited.
[320] Man and Woman, p. 377; Möbius, Stachylogie, 1901.
[321] The passage occurs in a lecture by Prof. Thomson and Mrs. Thomson on "The Position of Woman Biologically Considered," and was one of a series delivered in Edinburgh to consider and estimate the recent changes in the position of woman. The addresses have been published in a book entitled The Position of Woman, Actual and Ideal.
[322] Sexual Life of Our Times, p. 74.
[323] Sex and Society, pp. 306, 307.
[324] Quoted by Bloch, Sexual Life of Our Times, p. 80.
[325] Sexual Life of Our Times, pp. 80, 81.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER X
THE SOCIAL FORMS OF THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP
I.—Marriage
The difficulty of the problem of marriage—Facts to be considered—Marriage and the family among the animals—Among primitive peoples—Progress from lower to higher forms of the sexual association—An examination of the purpose of marriage—The fear of hasty reforms—Practical morality—Marriage an institution older than mankind—The practical moral ends of marriage—The racial and individual factors—No real antagonism between the two—What is good for the individual must react also for the benefit of the race—Various systems of marriage—Monogamy the form that has prevailed—The higher law of the true marriage—Conventional monogamic marriage—Its failure in practical morality—Coexistence with polygamy and prostitution—Chief grounds for the reform of marriage—An indictment by Mr. Wells—Our marriage system based upon the rights of property—This not necessarily evil—The Egyptian marriage contracts—The Roman marriage—The influence of Christianity—Asceticism and the glorification of virginity—Confusions and absurdities—The failure of our sexual morality—Mammon marriages—Sins against the race—Two examples from my own experience—The iniquity of our bastardy laws—The waste of love—Free-love—Its failure as a practical solution—The reform of marriage—The tendency to place the form of the sexual relationship above the facts of love—The dependence of the consciousness of duty upon freedom—The sexual responsibility of women.
II.—Divorce
Traditional morality—Practical conditions of divorce—The moral code—This must be modified to meet new conditions—The enforced continuance of an unreal marriage—This the grossest form of immorality—The barbarism of our divorce laws—The action of the Church and State—Confusion and absurdities—Divorce relief from misfortune, not a crime—Personal responsibility in marriage—A recognition of the equality of the mother with the father—Sanction by the State of free divorce—The example of Egypt and Babylon—The Roman divorce by consent—The condemnation of free divorce not the outcome of true morality—The immorality of indissoluble marriage—Loyalty and duty in love—The claims of the child—One advantage of free divorce—Adoption of children under the State—Growing disinclination against coercive marriage—The waste to the race—Our responsibility to the future.
III.—Prostitution
The dependence of prostitution upon marriage—The extent and difficulties of the problem involved—Prostitution essentially a woman's question—Women's past attitude towards it—The diffusion of disease by means of prostitution—Apathy and ignorance of women—This changing—What action will women take in the future?—Grounds for fear—The White Slave Bill—Its absurd futility—The opinion of Bernard Shaw—Poverty as a cause of prostitution—This not the only factor—The real evil lies deeper—The economic reformer—The moral crusade—Men's passions—Seduction—These causes need careful examination—Lippert's view—Idleness, frivolity, and love of finery as causes—The desire for excitement—The need for personal knowledge of the prostitute—What I have learnt from different members of this profession—The prostitute's attitude towards her trade—The sale of sex very profitable to the expert trader—The sexual frigidity of the prostitute—Importance and significance of this—A further examination into the causes of the evil—Poverty seldom the chief motive for prostitution—The influence of inheritance upon the sexual life—The degradation of our legitimate loves the ultimate cause of prostitution—The demand for the prostitute by men—Causes of this demand—Repression of the primitive sexual instincts by civilisation—The foolishness of casting blame upon men—The duplex morality of the sexes—Its influence on the degradation of passion—Woman's unprofitable service to chastity—The connection with prostitution—My belief in passion as the only source of help.
CHAPTER XToC
THE SOCIAL FORMS OF THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP
I.—Marriage
"The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement; it is a statement of fact. In so far as we are individuals, in so far as we seek to follow merely individual ends, we are accidental, disconnected, without significance, the sport of chance. In so far as we realise ourselves as experiments of the species for the species, just in so far do we escape from the accidental and the chaotic. We are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves."—H.G. Wells.
"There is no subject," says Bernard Shaw in his delightful preface to Getting Married, "on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage." And, in truth, it is not easy to avoid such foolishness if we understand at all the complexity of the relationship of the sexes. Sentiment rules our actions in this connection, whereas our talk on the subject is directed by intellect. And the demands of the emotions are at once more imperious and tyrannical, and more fastidious and more critical, than are the demands of the mind. Thus the more firmly reason checks the riot of imagination the greater the danger of error. Of all of which what is the moral? This: It is useless to talk or to think unless it is also possible and expedient to act.
Be it noted, then, first that our marriage customs and laws are founded and have been framed not for, or by, the personal needs—that is, the likes and dislikes of men and women, but by the exigencies of social and economic necessities. Now, from this it will be readily seen that individual inclinations are very likely, even if not bound, to clash with, as they seek to conform to, the usages of society. Always there will tend to be prevalent everywhere a hostility—at times latent, at others active—between these two forces; against the special desires of women and men on the one hand, and the laws enforced by a social and economic community on the other. Always there will tend to arise some who will desire to change the accepted marriage form, those who, considering first the personal needs, will advocate the loosening or the breaking of the marriage-bond; while others, looking only to the stability which they believe to be founded in law and custom, will seek to keep and to make the tie indissoluble.
This perpetual conflict is, it seems to me, the greatest difficulty that has to be faced in any effort to readjust the conditions of marriage. In our contemporary society there is a deep-lying dissatisfaction with the existing relations of the sexes, a yearning and restless need for change. In no other direction are the confusions and uncertainty of the contemporary mind more manifest. The change that has taken place so rapidly in the attitudes of women and men has brought with it a very strong and, what seems to be a new, revolt against the ignominious conditions of our amatory life as bound by coercive monogamy. We are questioning where before we have accepted, and are seeking out new ways in which mankind will go—will go because it must.
Yet just because of this imperative urging the greater caution is called for in introducing any changes in the laws or customs affecting marriage. Present social and economic conditions are to a great extent chaotic. It would be a sorry thing if in haste we were to establish practices that must come to an end, when we have freed ourselves from the present transition; changes that would not be for the welfare of generations still unborn. It will, however, hardly be denied by any one that reform is needed. All will admit that a change must be made in some direction, and an attempt to say where it should be tried must therefore be faced.
Does Nature give us any help in solving the problem? None whatever. It would seem, indeed, that Nature has in some ways arranged the love relation in regard to the needs of the two sexes very badly. But putting this aside for the present, it is clear that in regard to the form of marriage Nature has no preference; all ways are equal to her, provided that the race profits by them, or at least does not suffer too much from them. We found abundant proof of this in our examination of marriage and the family as established already in the animal kingdom; the modes of sexual association offer great variety, no species being of necessity restricted to any one form of union. Polygamy, polyandry, and monogamy all are practised. The family is sometimes patriarchal, though more often it is matriarchal, with the female the centre of it, and her love for the young infinitely stronger and more devoted than the male, though even in this direction there are many and notable exceptions. When we came to study the history of mankind we found similar conditions persisting. Separate groups living as they best could without caring about theories; their sexual conduct ordered by a compromise between the procreative needs on the one hand, and the necessities of the social conditions on the other. Marriage forms, as we understand them, were for long unknown, the relations of the sexes slowly evolving from a more or less restricted promiscuity to a family union at first merely temporary, and only later becoming fixed and permanent. Thus very gradually the primitive instinctive sex impulses underwent expansion, and always in the direction of the control of the individual desires in the interest of the family.
The unit of the group or state is the family, therefore sex-customs arise and laws are made not to suit the convenience of the woman or the man, but for the preservation and good of the family. In a word, the children—they are the pivot about which all regulations of marriage should turn.
It is certain, however, that such control and such laws have never in the past, and never in the future can be fixed to one unchanging form. In proof of this I must refer the reader back to the historical section of this book, where nothing stands out clearer than that the most diverse morality and customs prevail in matters of sex. Wherever for any reason there arises a tendency towards any form of sexual association, such form is likely to be established as a habit, and, persisting, it comes to be regarded as right, and is enforced by custom and later by law, and also sometimes sanctified by religion. It comes to be regarded as moral, and other forms become immoral.
Now, all this may seem to be rather far away from the matter we are discussing—the present dissatisfaction with our marriage system. But the point I want to make clear is this: there is no rigid and unchangeable code of right or wrong in the sexual relationship. Our opinions here are based for the most part on traditional morality, which accepts what is as right because it is established. A small but growing minority, looking in an exact opposite direction, turn to an ideal morality, considering the facts of sex not as they are, but as they think they ought to be. Both these attitudes are alike harmful. The one refuses to go forward, the other rushes on blindly, goaded by sentiment or by personal desires. And to-day the greater danger seems to me to rest with the hasty reformers. It is an essentially feminine crusade. By this I do not mean that it is advocated alone by women, but that in itself it must be regarded as feminine; a view which elevates a subjective ideal relationship of sex above all objective facts. The desires and feelings and sentiments are set up in opposition to historical experience and communal tradition. We hear much, and especially in the writings and talk of women, of such vapid phrases as "Self-realisation in love," "The enhancement of the individual life," and "The spiritualising of sex." Such personal views, which exalt the passing needs of the individual above the enduring interests of the race, are in direct opposition to progress. What is rather needed is an examination of marriage and other forms of our sexual relationships by practical morality, by which I mean the estimating of their merits and defects in relation to the vital needs of the community under the circumstances of the present.
To do this we must first clear our minds from the belief that regards our present form of monogamic marriage as ordained by Nature and sanctified by God. He who accepts the development of the love of one man for one woman from other and earlier forms of association may well look forward in faith to a future progress from our existing marriage: yet, though eager for reform, he will, remembering the slowness of this steady upward progress in love's refinement in the past, refrain from acting in haste, understanding the impossibility of forcing any Utopia of the sexes. No change can be made in a matter so intimate as marriage by a mere altering of the law. Only such reforms as are the natural outgrowth of an enlightened public feeling can be of benefit, and thus permanent in their result. I must go further than this and say that what may very possibly be right for the few cannot be regarded as practically moral and good until it can be accepted and acted upon by the people at large. In sex more than in any other department of life we are all linked together; we are our brother's keeper, and the blood of the race will be required at our hands. Many women, and some men, do not realise at all the immense complications of sex and the claims passion makes on many natures. I am sure that this is the explanation of much of the foolish talk that one hears. I tried to make clear in the first chapters of this book the irresistible elemental power of the uncurbed sexual instincts. And this force is at least as strong now as it was in the beginning of life. For in sex we have, as yet, learnt very little. We who are living among the sophistication of aeroplanes, the inheritors of the knowledge of all the ages, have still to pass in wonder along the paths of love, entering into it blindly and making all the old mistakes.
Am I, then, afraid that I plead thus for caution? No, I am not. I rest my faith in the development of the racial element in love side by side with its personal ends of physical and spiritual joy. For the sex impulses, which have ruled women and men, will assuredly come to be ruled by them. Just as in the past life has been moulded and carried on by love's selection, acting unconsciously and ignorant of the ends it followed, so in the future the race will be developed and carried onwards by deliberate selection, and the creative energy of love will become the servant of women and men. The mighty dynamic force will then be capable of further and, as yet, unrealised development. This is no vain hope. It has its proof in the past history of the selective power of love. The problems of our individual loves are linked on to the racial life. The hope for improvement rests thus in a growing understanding of the individual's relation to the race, and in an expansion of our knowledge and practice of the high duties love enforces.
Let us look now at the practical direction of the present. We have reached these conclusions as a starting-point—
(1) We have inherited marriage as a social, nay more, a racial institution.
(2) The practical moral end of marriage, whether we regard it from the wider biological standpoint or from the narrower standpoint of society, is a selection of the sexes by means of love, having as its social object the carrying on of the race, and as its personal object a mutual life of complete physical, mental, and psychical union.
(3) The first of these, the racial object, is the concern of the State; the second, the personal need of love, is the concern of the individual woman and man.
(4) It is the business of the State to make such laws that the interests of the race, i.e. the children, are protected.
From this it would seem to follow that beyond such care the State has nothing to do with the sexual relationship. Here I am placed in a difficulty. I cannot accept this view. I do not believe that the loves of women and men, even apart from children being born from such union, can ever be merely a personal matter between the two individuals concerned. For this reason any woman and man is a potential mother or father, and may become so in a later union. We cannot break the links which bind the individual to the race. I am very clear in my mind, however, of the need of recognising this perpetual duality in the objects of love. It is not necessary to bring forward any proof of the profound significance of the individual side of the sexual passion in the progress of civilisation. We may accept what is really proved by all of us in our acts, that love and love's embrace are not exercised only, or indeed chiefly, for the purpose of procreation, but are of quite equal importance to the parents, necessary for the complete life—the physical and mental development and the joy of the woman and the man.
It may seem, then, that we are thus faced by two opposing forces. That is not the case. There is real harmony underlying the apparent opposition of these two interests, and each is, indeed, the indispensable complement of the other. Both the personal and the further-reaching racial objects of love alike belong to the great synthesis of life. I do not, of course, deny, what every one knows, that there is at present an opposition and even conflict in certain individual cases. This is but one sign of chaos and the wastage of love. But this does not change the truth; there can be no gain for the individual in the personal ends of love unless there is also a corresponding gain to the wider racial end. The element of self-assertion in our loves must be brought into correlation with the universal and immortal development of life. This is so evident that I will not wait to elaborate it further. I will only point out that all the good, as also all the evil, that the individual is able to gain from love must ultimately react also for the benefit, or the wastage, of the race. Thus we have to get every good that we can out of our sexual experiences for ourselves for this very reason that we do not stand alone. It is because the race flows through us that we have to make the utmost of our individual opportunities and powers, so that, understanding our position as guardians to the generations yet unborn, we may use to the very full, but refrain from any misuse of love's possibilities of joy. We know that all we gain for ourselves we gain in trust for the race, and what we lose for ourselves we waste for the life to come. This has, of course, been said before by numberless people, but it seems to me it has been realised by very few, and until it is realised to the fullest extent it will never begin to be practised. We shall continue at a crossed purpose between our own interests and desires and the interests of the race, and shall go on wasting the forces of love needlessly and riotously.
Armed with these conclusions I shall now attempt to examine our existing marriage in its relation (1) to the needs of the children, (2) to the individual needs apart from parentage. The extent of the problems involved is almost illimitable, thus all that I can do is to touch very briefly and insufficiently on a few facts.
As we question in turn the various systems of marriage it becomes clear that monogamy is the form which has most widely prevailed, and will be likely to be maintained, because of its superior survival value. In other words, because it best serves the interests of the race by assuring to the woman and her children the individual interest and providence of the father. I believe further that monogamy of all the sexual associations serves best the personal needs of the parents; and, moreover, that it represents the form of union which is in harmony with the instincts and desires of the majority of people. The ideal of permanent marriage between one woman and one man to last for the life of both must persist as an ideal never to be lost. I wish to state this as my belief quite clearly. The higher love in true marriage is the veritable law of the life to be; and beside it all experiments in sensation will rot in their emptiness and their self-love.
But this faith of mine in an ideal and lasting union does not lessen at all my scepticism in the moral inefficacy of our present marriage system. It is not the particular form of marriage practised that, after all, is the main thing, but the kind of lives people live under that form. The mere acceptance of a legally enforced monogamy does not carry us very far in practical morality; we must claim something much deeper than this.
And this brings us to the base counterfeit of monogamy that is accepted and practised by many among us to-day; base because it is a monogamy largely mitigated by clandestine transitory loves—tipplings with sensation and snackings at lust which betray passion. Facts of daily observation may not be shuffled out of consideration by any hypocrisy. They must be faced and dealt with. Our marriage system is buttressed with prostitution, which thus makes our moral attitude one of intolerable deception, and our efforts at reform not only ineffective, but absurd. Without the assistance of the prostitution of one class of women and the enforced celibacy of another class our marriage in its present form could not stand. It is no use shirking it; if marriage cannot be made more moral—and by this I mean more able to meet the sex needs of all men and all women—then we must accept prostitution. No sentimentalism can save us; we must give our consent to this sacrifice of women as necessary to the welfare and stability of society. But with this question I shall deal in a later section of this chapter. There is, however, more than this to be said. Marriage is itself in many cases a legalised form of prostitution. From the standpoint of morals, the woman who sells herself in marriage is on the same level as the one who sells herself for a night, the only difference is in the price paid and the duration of the contract. Nay, it is probably fair to say that at the lowest such sale-marriage results in the greater evil, for the prostitute does not bear children. If she has a child it has, as a rule, been born first; such is our morality that motherhood often drives her on to the streets!
Any woman who marries for money or position is departing from the biological and moral ends of marriage. A child can be born gladly only as the fruit of love. It is in this direction, rather than in maintaining a barren virginity, that woman's chastity should be guarded. We may excuse women on the grounds of possible ignorance, but, none the less, have the conditions of marriage been unfavourable to the development of a fine moral feeling in women or in men. No one can have failed to feel surprised at the men many girls are content to marry; it is one thing that must be set against the claim women make as the morally superior sex. Mr. Wells, whom I have already quoted in this matter, places in the mouth of one of his characters, in his recent book, Marriage, a true and terrible indictment of women.
"If there was one thing in which you might think woman would show a sense of some divine purpose in life it is in the matter of children, and they show about as much care in the matter—oh, as rabbits! Yes, rabbits. I stick to it. Look at the things a nice girl will marry; look at the men's children she'll submit to bring into the world. Cheerfully! Proudly! For the sake of the home and the clothes!"
The fact is our marriage in its present legal form is primarily an arrangement for securing the rights of property. This in itself is not necessarily evil. Economic necessities cannot be ignored in any form of the sexual relationship; it is rather a readjustment that is called for here. We have seen how admirably a marriage system based upon property in the form of free contracts worked in Egypt, and how happy were the family relationships under this system of equal partnership between the wife and husband. I would again recommend the careful study of these marriage contracts to all those interested in marriage reform. The contracts were never fixed in one form; all that was required being that the interests of the woman and the children were in all cases protected. Take again the Roman marriage which, in its latest fine developments, has special interest, as the history of modern marriage systems may be traced back to it. The Romans came, like the Egyptians, to regard marriage as a contract rather than a legal form. In the custom of usus, which supplanted the earlier and sacred confarreatio, there was no ceremony at all. I would recall to the memory of my readers the significant fact that in both these great countries this freedom in marriage was associated with the freedom of woman. It must be recognised that these two forces act together.
Traditional customs in marriage, as in all other departments of life, tend to become worn out, and whenever any form presses too heavily on a sufficient number of individuals acting against, instead of for, the interests of those concerned, there arises a movement towards reform. This happened in Rome, and led to the establishment of marriage by usus, which was further modified by the practice known as conventio in manus, whereby the wife by passing three nights in the year from her husband was able to break through the terrible right of the husband's manus. It is possible that by some such simple way of escape we may come to change the pressure of our coercive marriage.
The briefest glance at our marriage system proves it to be founded on the patriarchal idea of woman as the property of man, which is sufficiently illustrated by the fact that a husband can claim sums of money as compensation from any man who sexually approaches his wife, while a woman, on her side, is granted compensation in the case of a breach of promise of marriage. If we seek to find how this condition has arisen we must look backwards into the past. To the fine legacy left by the Roman law (which, regarding marriage as a contract, placed the two sexes in a position of equal freedom) was added the customs of the barbarians and the base Jewish system, giving to the husband rights in marriage and divorce denied to the wife. Later, in the twelfth century, came the capture of marriage by the Church and the establishment of Canon law, whereby the property-value of marriage became inextricably mingled with the sanctification of marriage as a sacrament, which, strengthened by Christian asceticism and the glorification of virginity, involved a corresponding contempt cast on all love outside of legal marriage.[326] The action of this double standard of sexual morality has led on the one side to the setting-up of a theoretical ideal, which, as few are able to follow it, tends to become an empty form, and this, on the other side, leads to a hidden laxity that rushes to waste love out to a swift finish. The puritan view has left us an inheritance of denials. It is small wonder, under such circumstances, that marriage is often immoral, so often ending in repulsion and weariness. "Our sexual morality," it has been said with fine truth by Havelock Ellis, "is in reality a bastard born of the union of property-morality with primitive ascetic morality, neither in true relationship to the vital facts of life."
It may, indeed, be doubted if apart from property considerations we have left any sexual morality at all. How else were it possible for marriage (which, if it is to fulfil its moral biological ends, must be based on physical and mental affinity and fitness) to be contracted, as it often is, without knowledge or any true care of these essential factors, and, moreover, to guarantee a permanence of a relationship thus entered into blindly. At least it should be considered necessary that a certificate of the health of the partners be obtained before marriage. What is required to ensure our individual life ought to be demanded before we create new life. Here, as I believe, is one direction in which the State should take action. Parentage on the part of degenerate human beings is a crime, and as such it ought to be prevented. It may be, and is, argued that any action of the State in this direction entails an interference with the rights of the individual. Just the same may be said of all laws. The man who wishes to steal or to kill either another or himself may, with equal reason, hold that it is an interference of the law that he is not permitted to follow his inclinations in these matters. The sins that he may wish to commit are assuredly less evil in their results than the sin of irresponsible parentage. You see what I mean. For if this unceasing crime against the unborn could somehow be stopped there would be so great a reduction of all other sins that we might well be freed from many laws. As an example I would refer the reader back to the wise Spartans, to consider how great was the gain to them as individuals by their strict and unceasing care for the welfare of the race.
There are many who attribute to mammon-marriages all the terrible evils of our disordered love-life of to-day. It is, therefore, well to remember that such conditions are not really a new thing, and cannot be regarded as the result of our commercialised civilisation. The intrusion of economics into marriage is of very ancient origin, and may be found among peoples who are almost primitive. But there is this important difference. In earlier and more vigorous societies such property-based marriages occur side by side with other forms of sexual associations, on a more natural basis, which are openly accepted and honoured. Our marriage system by its rigorous exclusions closes this way of escape. Morality may be outraged to any extent provided that law and religion have been invoked in legal marriage.
Let me give my readers two cases from my own experience; facts speak more forcibly than any mere statements of opinion. In a village that I know well a woman, legally married, bore five idiot children one after the other; her husband was a confirmed drinker and a mental degenerate. One of the children fortunately died. The text that was chosen as fitting for his funeral card was, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." About the same time in the same village a girl gave birth to an illegitimate child. She was a beautiful girl; the father, who did not live in the village, was strong and young; probably the child would have been healthy. But the girl was sent from her situation and, later, was driven from her home by her father. At the last she sought refuge in a disused quarry, and she was there for two days without food. When we found her her child had been born and was dead. Afterwards the girl went mad. I will add no comment, except to record my belief that under a saner social organisation such crimes against love would be impossible.
As was said years ago by the wise Sénancour, "The human race would gain much if virtue were made less laborious." Let us view these large questions in the light of their results to the individual and the race. This practical morality will serve us better than any traditional code. So only shall we learn to see if we cannot rid love of stress and pain that is unendurable. We force women and men into rebellion, into fearing concealments, and the dark and furtive ways of vice. For this reason we must, I believe, make the regulations of law as wide as possible, taking care only that mothers and all children must be safeguarded, whether in legal marriage or outside. All of which forces the conclusion: the same act of love cannot be good or bad just because it is performed in or out of marriage. To hold such an opinion is really as absurd as saying that food is more or less digestible according to whether grace is, or is not, said before the meal. All marriage forms are only matters of custom and expediency.
In face of the iniquity of our bastardy laws we may well pause to doubt the traditional ideas of our sexual code and conventional morality. It seems to me that in these questions of sex we have receded further and further from the reality of things, and become blinded and baffled by the very idols to love that men have set up. One thing renders love altogether and incurably wrong, and that is waste. The terribly high death-rate among illegitimate children alone suffices to illustrate the actual conditions, to say nothing of the greater waste often carried on in those children who live. The question of the maintenance of such unfathered children is a scandal of our time. We may surely claim that the birth of any child, without exception, must be preceded by some form of contract which, though not necessarily binding the mother and the father to each other, will place on both alike the obligation of adequate fulfilment of the duties to their child. This, I believe, the State must enforce. If inability on the part of the parents to make such provision is proved, the State must step in with some wide and fitting scheme of insurance of childhood. The carrying out of even these simple demands will lead us a great step forward in practical morality. It will open up the way to a saner and more beautiful future.
But here, in case I am mistaken and thought to be desiring the loosening of the bonds between the sexes, I must repeat again how firmly I accept marriage as the best, the happiest, and the most practical form of the sexual association. The ideal union is, I am certain, an indestructible bond, trebly woven of inclination, duty, and convenience. Marriage is an institution older than any existing society, older than mankind, and reaches back, as Fabre's study of insects has so beautifully shown us, to an infinitely remote past. Its forms are, therefore, too fundamentally blended with human and, further back, with animal society for them to be shaken with theories, or even the practices of individuals or groups of individuals. Thus I accept marriage: I believe that its form must be regulated and cannot be left to the development of individual desires against the needs of the race.
There are some who, in seeking liberation from the ignominious conditions of our present amatory life, are wishing to rid marriage from all legal bonds, and are pointing to Free-love as the way of escape. To me this seems a very great mistake. I admit the splendid imaginative appeal in the idea of Love's freedom as it is put forward, for instance, by the great Swedish feminist, Ellen Key; I am unable to accept it as practical morality. This, I believe, should be the only sound basis for reform. The real question is not what people ought to do, but what they actually do and are likely to go on doing. It is these facts that the idealist fails to face. Love is a very mixed game indeed. And all that the wisest reformer has ever been able to do is to make bad guesses at the solution of its problems.
The fundamental principle of the new ideal morality is that love and marriage must always coincide, and, therefore, when love ceases the bond should be broken. This in theory is, of course, right. I doubt if it is, or ever will be, possible in practice. Experience has forced the knowledge that the most passionate love is often the most likely to end in disaster. Nor do I think that the evil is much lessened when no legal bond is entered into. Those few people who have made a success of Free-love would probably have made an equal success of marriage. I know personally several cases in which the same woman, and many in which the same man, has tried in succession legal marriage and free unions and has been equally unhappy in both.
All the facts seem to me to point in another direction for reform. I do not think that life's great central purpose of carrying on the race (not alone giving birth to fit children, but the equally necessary work of both parents uniting in caring for and bringing them up) can be left safely to be confused and wasted by its dependence on the gratification of personal desires. I wish that I thought otherwise. It would make it all so much easier. It is useless to point back here to the action of love's selection in the past history of life. As civilisation progresses, and as individual needs become elaborated and wealth increases, we tend to get further and further away from the realities of love. We choose our partners without understanding, and think very little of the needs of the future. What I want is to free marriage from those bonds that can be proved to act against practical morality. I do not wish at all to lessen its binding, only to defend it against the conventions of a false and narrow traditional morality. In love, as in every human relationship, it is character that avails and prevails—nothing else. Marriage is, or ought to be, the most practically moral institution that any civilisation is able to produce. Women and men are likely to get out of any form of the sexual association results in proportion to that which they put into it. A great many people put nothing into marriage, and they are disappointed when they get out of it—nothing. We shall put more into marriage, and not less, in proportion as we come to understand it and to value its enduring importance.
After all it is the people of any race who make marriage, not marriage the people. The form of union is but a symbol of the people's character, their desires, and capacities. If we have evolved the wrong women and men, then any reform of marriage is vain. Have we in our weakened civilisation drifted so far from life that the inherent attributes of loyalty and discipline to the future are no longer with us in sufficient measure adequately to respond to the enduring realities of love? The answer is with women. We must demand from the fathers of our children, as we demand from ourselves, loyalty to the well-being of the race; the discipline of our personal desires and loves that we may maintain ourselves fit as the bearers and protectors of those wider interests, which belong not to ourselves, not to this generation alone, but to the life and the future history of our race. Woman must again assert, as she did in the past, that she is the maker of men. She must reclaim her right, held by the female from the beginning of life, as the director of love's selective power. And more even than this. Woman with man must be the framer of the law, and the guide and director of all the relations of the sexes. But it is not sufficient to do this by mere proclamation. Virile nations are not made by theories or by the blast of the trumpet. They are reared in the bonds of marriage, and what we incorporate in that bond will be manifest in our children.
II.—Divorce
"The result of dissolving the formal stringency of the marriage relationship, it is sometimes said, would be a tendency to an immoral laxity. Those who make this statement overlook the fact that laxity tends to reach a maximum as the result of stringency, and that where the merely external authority of a rigid marriage law prevails then the extreme excesses of licence must flourish. It is also undoubtedly true, and for the same reason, that any sudden removal of restraints necessarily involves a reaction to the opposite extreme of licence. A slave is not changed in a stroke into an autonomous free man."—Havelock Ellis.
In putting forward a practical morality for marriage we have to remember that we are not really uprooting traditional morality. There is no necessity. Of its own decay the old morality has fallen in a confusion of ruin. The ideal marriage is the union of one woman with one man for life. This we have established. We have now to look at the question from another side and ask, How far is this ideal monogamy possible in practice? I think the answer must be that, as we stand at present, it is possible to very few. For marriage is essentially a state of bondage—there is no getting away from this—a state which calls upon the individual to surrender his personal freedom in the interests of the race and the stability of social structure. I have proved that this bondage acts really for the benefit and happiness of the individual, but this deep truth I must now leave. Marriage is, thus, a concession of the individual to the general welfare of the future and of the State. Now, with human nature as it is in its present development, it is clearly claiming the impossible to demand indissoluble marriage. Divorce is really implicit in the conditions of marriage itself, and the firmest believers in monogamy must be the supporters of practical and moral conditions of divorce.
The moral code of any society represents the experience of its members. But experience is continually changing and enlarging, and moral codes must also change and enlarge, or they become worn-out and useless. Those people who are unable to modify their moral code to fit new conditions and growth are doomed to extinction, while the people who adjust their customs and laws to meet new requirements open up the way to move on, and still onwards, in continual progress.
It were well to remember this as we come to question the conditions of our law of divorce. There can be no possible doubt that if marriage is to remain and become moral there must be an easier dissolution of its bonds. The enforced continuance of an unreal marriage is really the grossest form of immorality, harmful not only to the individuals concerned, but to the children. The prejudices handed down to us by past tradition have twisted morals into an assertion that a husband or wife who have ceased to love must continue to share the rites of marriage in mutual repugnance, or live in an unnatural celibacy.
The question as to how this condition arose may be answered very briefly. The Church ordained that marriage is indissoluble, but, this being found impossible to maintain in practice, the State stepped in with a way of escape—a kind of emergency exit. But what a makeshift it is! how flagrantly indecent! how inconsistent! Adultery must be committed. To escape the degradation of an unworthy partner another partner must first be sought, and love degraded in an act of infidelity. Adultery is, in fact, a State-endowed offence against morality, just as the indissolubility of marriage is a theological perversion of the plainest moral law, that the true relationship between the sexes is founded on love. This bastard-born morality of Church and State is as immoral in theory as it is evil in practice.
For if we look deeper it becomes clear that the test to be applied here is the same as in every relation between the sexes: the conditions of divorce, like the conditions of marriage, must be such as best serve the interests of the race. This means, in the first place, that both partners in a marriage must have the assurance that when the moral conditions of the contract are broken, or through any reason become inefficient, they can be liberated, without any shame or idea of delinquency being attached to the dissolution. "Divorce is relief from misfortune and not a crime," to quote from the admirable statute-book of Norway, a saying which should be one of universal application in divorce. This must be done not merely as an act of justice to the individual; it is called for equally in the interests of the race. The woman or man from whom a divorce ought to be obtained is in almost all cases the woman or man who ought not to be a parent. We may go further than this. Divorce cannot be considered on the physical side alone, there is a psychological divorce which is far deeper, and also far more frequent. The woman or man who for any reason is unhappy in marriage is unfitted to be a parent in that marriage, and the way should be opened to them, if they desire, to have other children born in love in a new marriage with a more fitting mate. Our eyes are shut to the damning facts which confront us on every side. Take, for instance, the case of the drunkard, the insane, the syphilitic, the consumptive, parent bound in marriage. On biological and economic grounds it is folly to leave in such hands the protection of the race. It is the business of the State, as I believe, to regulate the law to prevent, as far as possible, the birth of unfit children; at least we may demand that Church and State cease to grant their sanction to this flagrant sin.
It is of the utmost importance to realise that Divorce Law Reform is needed to bring our jurisprudence up to the level of the modern civilised State. Our law in this respect lags far behind that of other countries, and is only one example out of many of our hide-bound attachment to ancient abuses. The opposition shown against the splendid and fearless recommendations for the extension of the grounds of divorce, voiced by the Majority Report in the recent Divorce Law Commission, prove how far we are still from understanding the higher morality of marriage. The recent Commission and the strong movement in favour of reform will, without doubt, lead to a change in the glaring injustice and inconsistencies of our law. It is, however, certain that an enlightened divorce law must go much further than providing ways of escape from marriage. Such exits tend to destroy the true sanctity of marriage; also they are unable to meet the needs of all classes, no matter how wide and numerous they are. They can never form the ultimate solution. They tend to make marriage ridiculous, and there are real grounds in the objections raised against them. There must be no special exits; the door of marriage itself must be left open to go out of as it is open to enter. This will come. When personal responsibility in marriage is developed, when all the relationships of sexes are founded on the recognition of the equality of the mother with the father—the woman with the man, then will come divorce by mutual consent.
Whenever divorce is difficult, there woman's lot is hard and her position low. It is a part of the patriarchal custom which regards women as property. It would be easy to prove this by the history of marriage in the civilisations of the past, as also by an examination of the present divorce laws in civilised countries. I cannot do this, but I make the assertion without the least shadow of doubt. I would point back in proof to the Egyptian and Babylonian divorce law, and to the splendid development of Roman Law in this direction. Consent is accepted as necessary to marriage; it should be the condition of divorce. This, I believe, is the only solution which women will be content to accept, when once they are awakened to their responsibilities in marriage. And here I would quote the wise dictum of Mr. Cunninghame Graham: "Divorce is the charter of Woman's Freedom".
The condemnation of divorce and the pillorying of divorced persons are not really the outcome of any concern for true morality, though most people deceive themselves that they are. They are predominantly the outcome of ignorance, of prejudices and false values, based, on the one hand, on the primitive patriarchal view of the wife (hence the insistence on woman's chastity and the inequality of the law), and, on the other, on the ecclesiastical doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage and the sin of all relationships outside its bonds. It is only when we realise how deeply and terribly these worn-out views have saturated and falsified our judgments that we come to understand the barbarism of our present laws of divorce.
It is significant that those who talk most of the sanctity of marriage are the very people who fear most the extension of divorce, seeming to believe that any loosening of its chains would lead to a dissolution of the institution of marriage. One marvels at the weakness of faith shown in such a view. It is not possible to hold the argument both ways. If the partners in marriage are happy, why lock them in? if not, why pretend that they are? The best argument I ever heard for divorce was a remark made to me in a conversation with a working man. He said, "When two people are fighting it is not very safe to lock the door". After all, what you do is this: you give occasion for the locks to be broken.
I have already spoken of loyalty and duty in relation to marriage, and nothing that I say now must be thought to lessen at all my deep belief in the personal responsibility of the individual in every relationship of the sexes. Living together even after the death of love may, indeed, be right if this is done in the interests of the children. But it can never be right to compel such action by law. For then in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred what is regarded as duty is really a question of expediency. It is very easy to deceive ourselves. And it requires more courage than most people possess to face the fact that what has perhaps been a happy and fruitful marriage has died a slow and bitter death. But the higher morality claims that a child must be born in love and reared in love, or, at the lowest, in an atmosphere from which all enmity is absent. Only the parent who is strong enough to subordinate the individual right to the rights of the child can safely remain in a marriage without love.
One great advantage of free divorce is that the wife and husband would not part, as is almost inevitable under present conditions, in hatred, but in friendship. This would enable them to meet one another from time to time and unite together in care of any children of the marriage. If such reasonable conduct was for any reason impossible on the part of either or both parents, then the State must appoint a guardian to fill the place of one parent or both. No child should be brought up without a mother and a father. The adoption of children under the State might in this way open up fruitful opportunities whereby childless women and men might gain the joys of parenthood.
This condition of safety by free-divorce once established, would do much to mitigate the hostility against marriage which is so unfortunately prevalent among us to-day. Practical morality is teaching us the immorality of indissoluble marriage. In Spain, a country that I know well, where marriage is indissoluble, an increasing number of men—and these the best and most thoughtful—are refraining from marriage for this very reason. It follows, as a result, that in Spain the illegitimate birth-rate is very high. The difficulty of divorce is also a strong factor that upholds prostitution.
Many women and men of exceptional gifts and character, conscious of an increasing intolerance against the makeshift morality imposed upon our sexual life, are standing outside of marriage and evading parentage. For this waste we are responsible to the future. Thus, finally, we find this truth: the principle of divorce reform forms the most practical foundation—and one waiting ready to our hands—for the reformation of marriage and the re-establishment of its sanctity. It also has direct and urgent bearing on many of the problems of womanhood.