Now, to the self-assertive, feminist mind, imbued with industrial ideals, this scene may make no appeal. Its peace is too quiet. Here is none of the modern unrest, the boredom, the moving about in worlds unrealised. But I do not think this will be noted. The one suggestion that will leap to the thoughts is the dependent position of the women. This is true, but it is equally true that the power of the women is far greater than it is in any industrial home. And we find that such power is not exercised by the young women and on account of any sexual attraction, in the way to which we are accustomed and have come to expect, but the power is held by the mother, whose desires through life are a law to her son. I can hardly emphasise too strongly this power and influence of the mother at all times when the family is firmly established. I think it must be granted that the mother has lost her position of influence in the home wherever industrial views of life have penetrated. She has little power over her grown-up sons or even over her daughters. Self-assertion is also the desire of the children; they want to break away from the mother. Perhaps this is inevitable, and maybe it is right. It is very difficult to be certain.

I will not dwell on this question. I would, however, ask you to keep fixed in your attention this hesitation that has entered as a disease into our modern consciousness. We are without purpose, and have no absolute standard of conduct. And the result for most of us is a life of confused aims, restless and seeking, achieving by accident what is achieved at all.

There have been, of course, many separate causes and influences uniting to bring this unrest, but the disorganisation of the patriarchal home, with the change in the ideal and desires of women, has acted very strongly as a disturbing force. We have lost, especially, that harmony in life which woman alone is able to create.

Within the patriarchal family-group women lived a life that was complete in itself, the home was self-contained because it included all the elements necessary for the carrying on of a useful and healthy life. True this home life, complete as it was in itself, was not life in the fullest sense of living, for it lacked some of the larger elements that only freedom of action can give. It was for women a restricted, and, in later times, even a stunted life: in the end it came to be a parasitic life. But for long it was a natural and satisfying life and it was always entirely feminine, because motherhood embraced it all, inspiring every motive and guiding every act.

What we want is the family reconstructed, with all its historic bonds of unity and sanctity preserved and yet fitted to meet modern needs. It must be a home where life can be lived in its fulness and its depth. It is clear that this reconstruction is not going to be easy. Such a task must even be held to be absurd, if we view life from the modern standpoint, which can only be that of the doctrine of self-assertion. Where the Self is so insistent, there can be no consciousness of duty as something fixed and of life as being purposive, consecrated to an end, which may not be left or taken up. And the first thing necessary is to break through the separate aims that cause such confusion in women’s thoughts and desires. No standard of action can be fixed until we know what we want. Separation must arise from self-assertion. Nothing worth doing can be done until the collective consciousness of women has found itself and regained a unifying ideal.

Life at the moment is in a state of too violent instability for any attempts to reconstruct the home to be of any avail, and, in any case, it is difficult to believe that any new form of the family can in modern times exercise the sway that the patriarchal system wielded in times gone by. And yet some standard we must have, or the confusion in women’s lives will go on, and all feminine idealism must perish through the very number of its varieties.

Now, it may be that the forces which acted against the family in its past history are acting again to-day. Communal living and group homes have been tried already in the beginnings of civilisation. They were developed on account of conditions of danger which threatened the primitive family-groups, forcing them to unite with one another for mutual protection and help.[71] To-day again the home is threatened. Industrialism has steadily undermined its foundations, and changed the desire of women. Industrial workers have departed far indeed from the ideal of absolute self-dedication and service to the home that once was the supreme conception of woman. And now a further step has been taken. War has made necessary conditions that industrialism first taught women to desire. For the first time in our industrial history a demand has arisen for women’s labour as pressing and large as the supply. Hundreds and thousands of women and girls have been called from their homes to carry on the necessary work of the country. There are already 195,000 women employed in munition work, while 275,000 more women are engaged in industrial occupations.[72]

Women have shown that there is hardly any work of men that they cannot do. They are driving motor-lorries, they are working on the railways, acting as conductors on trams and buses; they are doing the postman’s round and carman’s deliveries; they are ploughing and sowing the land; they are standing long hours at the mechanic’s lathe. Women are everywhere.

And day by day the country is calling for more, and yet more women workers. They are wanted on the land, they are wanted in the factories, they are wanted in the shops, in offices, in schools, they are wanted in every kind of industry. Women will answer the call; they will take the places of those who have gone to fight, for their patriotism is as strong as the patriotism of men. That women should work to-day is unavoidable: it is war.

Yet necessary as this working of women is for the duration of war, it is equally necessary that the conditions of their labour should be regulated to meet the special needs of their feminine constitution. In all cases where women are doing men’s work they should work shorter hours, have longer rests and more holidays. Do we understand what the results of overwork may be? It is racial suicide to allow adolescent girls and young women, who are, or who will be, mothers, to do work which may break into or overstrain their reserve strength, using up now what ought to be given to the next generation. A nation’s wealth and future depend directly on the health and nerve reserve of its women. It is deplorable that these forces of life are being used so wastefully. I know well that in the confusion of the times it is not easy to get public attention for the needs of women workers. Yet the importance of this matter is such that delay may be disastrous.

A further consideration arises, and one, too, that is vital. After the war, what will happen? Peace is the normal state of the world and we shall return to it—some day. Are these conditions of continuous work for women to go on then? There is much to cause grave fear. Women—and I have spoken to many of them on the subject—seem to regard this taking on of men’s work, not as a temporary thing forced on them by the necessities of war, but as the gaining of a goal for which for long they have been fighting.

Here is some of the talk that I have heard at women’s meetings or read in recent articles by feminist writers: “New fields of action lie open to women on all sides, the opportunities are coloured with splendid possibilities”; or “The need for workers is woman’s opportunity, and as such she recognises and will use it.” Again, “The path lies open and clear before women, their hour has come to establish a rooted and solid foundation for the woman worker of the future.” And yet again, “Woman has done more than any man could have imagined to win this war. At the same time she has won a new station for herself.”

Now to me all such talk is the visible sign of the deplorable failure in women’s lives. Feminists tell me that the breaking up of the individual home with the institutional rearing of children will liberate women. By this plan of reform they will be free, able to have children and also to devote themselves to gainful work. They will gain the economic independence for which they are so loudly crying. Motherhood will be but a short interruption in the professional or industrial career—mother-care a superstition of the past.

What can I say to show how misplaced and how mischievous is the outlook of those who thus turn away from the long experience of the past? It is not so that the problems of the future can be solved. The past gives us proof enough that woman’s creation, the home, has been her great contribution to civilisation. No transitory needs or seeming personal gains can counterbalance the loss that must come to us as a people from woman’s neglect of positive duties. There has been neglect under industrial conditions. Escape was impossible. And in our homes there has been urgent need for reform. Here I am in agreement with those who discredit the value of the home. I, too, am certain that our family and home life, in many directions, have been as bad as they could be. A radical change is needed, but I hope it will be in the opposite direction from the plan of institutional upbringing of the children, and the substitution of the communal dwelling-house for the individual home.

I know well, as every woman must know, that the creating of the right kind of home is no easy task, but one that demands the continuous presence of the mother, with an unceasing giving of herself in body and in soul.

And the trouble is that under industrial ideals of restless discontent and of pulling down the barriers, the majority of women have become more and more unfitted for efficient home-making. Of one fact I am certain. Things cannot go on as before. Here is the reason. The supervision of the home and the maintenance of any true form of family life is not compatible with the regular outside occupation of married women. Such a duplication of a woman’s energies can be undertaken only by her using for herself and her work the reserve of physical, mental, and spiritual energy that should be stored and given to her children. To deny this is foolishness. Are women possessed of inexhaustible stores of energy? Do the ordinary rules of arithmetic and subtraction not hold good in their case? It would seem so. For women are maintaining that to divert so large a proportion of their energies in fresh directions will not involve any diminution of the strength available for their own affairs. Women are oddly blind.

Yet modern experience makes it daily more evident that to do any work well requires the employment of one’s whole time with a complete concentration of attention. Now the woman is rare who can put the best of herself both into professional work and into her home. One or other must suffer, and since the standard required in the outside work is fixed and cannot, as a rule, be lowered, if the position is to be retained, it is the home that is certain to suffer. A wife’s and a mother’s duties cannot be accomplished in stray hours snatched from professional work. I speak from my own experience. I know that the attempt to do this results too often in failure, together with an intolerable overstrain.

The case is much worse with the industrial worker, the conditions of whose existence make any kind of home life impossible. What, then, is the remedy? The answer that will be given by many is the raising of women’s wages to the same level as the wages of men and the improving of the conditions of labour. This will do something, but it will not do what I want. Conditions that at bottom are continuously wrong need revolutionising, not patching up. The change must be a different one, if the ideal of the home for which I am pleading is to be saved. There is one way out, and only one. The socially wasteful, racially suicidal, and body and soul withering consequences of the working of mothers outside the home must cease.

I know well the difficulties. Self-centred professional women, worldly women who have never found their souls, cultured intellectuals chasing the new, dreamers who think to reform society—all these and many other women are preaching the doctrine that the economic independence of woman is essential for her own well-being and equality with men. This, as I believe, is a profound mistake that is dependent on industrial values. But on this question I have spoken already, and I shall speak again in a later chapter.

Let us clear our thoughts absolutely, or at least as far as we humanly can, from personal standards of value. The home is not a bygone contrivance to be given up as useless in the march of humanity. Each home that is established in love will burn in its children an ineradicable impression that no folly from those who have missed its protection will be strong enough to destroy.

The demand that women shall prepare for competition with men at all costs will fall into foolishness under wiser conditions of life. This must surely be. For women’s qualities and capacities are different from those of men. What is paramount in woman is secondary in man; her dominant qualities are not the same as his, but different. And by using her subordinate qualities, as she must do, in competition with man, she is up against the dominant qualities in him and will be beaten by him: on the other hand, if woman develops her dominant qualities with a wise education in youth and afterwards by training herself in the right performance of her own work, she cannot fail increasingly to occupy a position of power. And this is only another way of saying that woman can achieve her highest position only as a woman. As a worker she has at all times and in all races occupied a secondary place, as woman she is the strongest force in life. We cannot escape from nature, and no matter how seemingly urgent it is for women to train themselves to act like men on account of prevailing economic conditions, it is always wrong at the bottom to yield to those conditions: the results will not fail to bring evil in the future.

Let us know where we are going.

War conditions have rushed women forward at a racing speed on the paths which their desire previously had made them seek. If after the coming of peace the desire of women is not turned back to family duties and the home, if it still seems better and happier to them to do men’s work than to do their own—then the individual home may be swallowed up and replaced by some form of communal living. This may be necessary; it can never be an ideal.

And further, let us remember that it will not be a step forward in progress; rather will it be a sign of failure, a step made necessary by the confusion and conflicts of our industrial civilisation. We delude ourselves for want of knowledge when we think that we are thus advancing to something that is new. The long houses of Iroquois Indians, the joint tenement houses of the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico and Arizona, and the village communities common among the Panang Highlanders of Sumatra are a few instances of the many early experiments in communistic life. Even Garden Suburbs have been tried by the Creek Indians of Georgia, where the natives live together in groups of associated dwellings.[73] Did I not tell you that many of the reforms we are seeking in the belief that they are new discoveries, giving proof of our progress, are really worn-out forms that are as old as mankind? They are even older. I would recall the curious experiments in co-operative child-rearing made by the Adélie penguins, noted in Chapter V. These pre-human parents would seem to be troubled with a strongly developed egoism. Craving liberty for play, they pool their families in what I may perhaps call “the primordial co-operative nursery scheme”—a plan of child-rearing much advocated by advanced feminists. Among the penguins the results are not satisfactory. True, the penguin mothers have liberty to play with the penguin fathers, but the price thereby paid is an excessively high mortality among the young birds.[74]

I recognise that co-operative nurseries and proposals for freeing mothers to work outside the home have interest for some women, and consequently have their use: they will help, no doubt, those women who while desiring and physically fit to bear children, yet have no capacity or wish to care for them. There are many such women to-day. I regard this as a great evil.

It has been left to modern intellectual women to fail utterly to understand the primary value of the home. Its first service is to immerse the child in a protective environment of its own. I wish to emphasise these five concluding words. They will make clearer why I believe so firmly in the patriarchal individual family. Each child needs to feel in personal connection with its surroundings—that what is nearest to him belongs to him and is his own. And this connection can be established only by love, and maintained by a lasting tradition of duty on the part of both the parents bound to each other in service to the child.

It is often objected that children are happier and healthier away from their parents, and that no conditions could possibly be worse than those which exist in countless homes. I know this. But it is no indictment against the home as an institution, rather it is an indictment of the kind of home and of the mother and the father.

I can hardly express too strongly my own want of faith in the expert child-trainer. I have found always that they regard the child, mainly, if not entirely, as something to be improved and instructed on a definite plan. The expert is never human, and the child has need of all the human element that it can get. It has absolute need of a mother and of a father. And it is impossible to be parents in the complete and right sense apart from the individual home. All experience shows us that the home, with its sympathetic relationships of mutual affection, cannot be replaced. We must insist on conditions of society that will make home life possible. The child has to accept the arrangements we make as a sacred thing, that is why this question is of such immense importance. If the matter could be fixed by the will of children, I should have no fear. The child has not lost the true values of life.

We have grown careless of the home under the blighting effects of industrialism. And the problem of the child is much more difficult in the case of modern mothers, who have few children and no strong traditions—no fixed standard of child training and of home life. Each mother is continually making personal experiments, a course of conduct that is not only harmful to the individual child, but one that must lead to collective confusion. Under such conditions excessive ardour may be as dangerous as neglect. One of the most unfortunate children I have known was an idolised only child with most conscientious modern parents, who kept a record in many large volumes of its every act and every saying. This child was trained out of childhood. There may be too much care and attention given by the parents as well as too little.

Motherhood in theory much praised, poetised, and hailed as a wonderful thing, often in actual expression is the strongest deterrent influence in the life of the child. The mother cannot realise the young life that has come from her life apart from herself. The child is too near to her. And it follows from this that her instinct and her love are not primarily concerned with the child, rather she is interested in it chiefly as its mother, that is, the birth-giver and possessor of the child. Most mothers bind their children to them much too closely with an egoistic love which is the most poisonous form of selfishness. Therefore the mother often is the real enemy in the home, the most self-centred and conservative member.

There are, of course, exceptional mothers who have the knowledge and the will to avoid such danger; mothers who as need arises are strong enough even to push their children from them at any personal cost; who insist on the freedom of each child, and see it has the opportunity to grow up harmoniously, unhampered and unspoilt, and according to its own nature. But such wise mothers to-day are few. And the average mother is like the hen with her brood, for ever fretting about her chicks if they venture away from her. In such conduct there is a terrible infringement of the personal rights of the child. Indeed, the mother too often enslaves with kindness, a bondage harder to bear and even more difficult to escape from than the brutal fist of a father.

Now, this mother-egoism will not be changed easily. It is a quality that reaches far back before human parenthood, and is instinctive and not conscious. You will recall that I referred to this in Chapter VI,[75] where I tried to find an explanation. We saw then the manner in which the maternal instinct was fixed and strengthened. The mother became chief parent, as soon as the early stages of mother-care were changed from an external to an internal process. This strengthened immeasurably the relation of the mother to the offspring, who now became an extension of her life. Before, the mother’s relation to the family was not very different from the relation of the father, and was dependent on parental sacrifice and the amount of care bestowed. And one result of the change was a deepening of egoism—of the self-feeling, if I may so call it—in the mother’s love, a quality which has a much deeper significance that is commonly recognised. In my opinion it is stronger in the love of the mother than it ever is in the love of the father. Mother-love is not quite the unselfish thing we have been accustomed to believe. Even the care which is bestowed so lavishly upon the child is often but the outward sign of a self-fussing anxiety, and serves no true purpose, but is a hindrance to the child’s health and happiness.

I would emphasise this difference between the two parents, a difference which may be marked in the father’s attitude to and affection for the child. It seems to me to be of great importance. It is the popular view among women who are too idle to think—it saves them the trouble of detecting their own faults—that all good women have an instinctive understanding of a child and of its needs. This is very far from being true. And, indeed, there are good grounds for believing—though I own I do not like to acknowledge it—that the father’s guidance and sympathy are of even greater importance to the spiritual well-being and happiness of the child than the excessive care and too-absorbing love of the mother.

Here, then, is yet another reason why we must regard with profound mistrust the modern movement to break away from the tried and fixed institution of the patriarchal home. We have seen again and again in our examination of the past history of parenthood, that wherever the father has been cut off from the family and the duties in caring for the young, a deterioration has followed. The development of the individual family is most intimately connected with patriarchy. It was under this system that the father’s position in the family and his right to his children were established. Nature sees to it that the tie between the mother and the child cannot be set aside; the case is different with the father, and his position in the family has to be made secure in another manner. We need to remember the degradation of fatherhood which must be connected with any matriarchal programme. And my own faith in the patriarchal family-group and the individual home, a faith that has only recently been fixed and made strong, is based upon this: I am convinced that it is the natural and, indeed, the only way of securing the loving care of both parents for the upbringing of the children.

In these days of destruction and of the pulling down of barriers, the home is exposed to peculiar danger. Much, incalculably much, depends on women’s attitude. The maternal instinct, or what I would call the mother-sense, has surely lost in quality. When I think about this, I feel as if I would like to found an order for motherhood. Everything to be truly done must become a religion. And motherhood should have its ritual no less than faith. There is not a single act of duty in the home and in care given to the child which the mother may not make into a spiritual exercise of her soul. The child should be the mother’s creation. She is the potter with the power to mould the clay, and she should know the rapture of the artist. I want to bring back to motherhood the quality it has lost.

The home awaits a fresh inspiration to turn back and hold the desire of women. We have to find again the right way. If we get our ideal fixed, it will be translated later into the acts of our life.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER IX
MONOGAMOUS MARRIAGE AND WOMAN

CHAPTER IX
MONOGAMOUS MARRIAGE AND WOMAN

It is commonly asserted—I am not sure whether it is really believed—that woman is instinctively monogamous, whereas man by his sexual nature is bent towards polygamy.

Now, my experience and desire for truth forces me to doubt the reality of this view. I believe that the woman’s superiority in this matter of constancy, even when it is present, is not fundamental to the female character any more than it is fundamental to the character of the male, and, indeed, I am inclined to think that it is the man who in his desire is more bent than woman towards complete faithfulness in the sexual partnership, and if it is the wife who more often is apparently and outwardly constant in marriage than the husband, it is because such conduct is expected of her and has been forced upon her by the conventions of her life. We must see things a little more as they are. Compared with woman, man is a comparatively constant creature, romantic, and not readily moved from his love when once it is fixed. I am very certain that I am right in this. No man leaves a woman till she sends him from her: while she wants him, and lets him feel that she wants him, he is hers.

What is symbolised by the myth representing Eve as first eating of the fruit and then offering it to Adam: the representation of the man in subjection to the woman, the bending of his action to her will through his need of her; the active rôle being here rightly attributed to the woman which man in the blindness of his masculine conceit has pretended to hold himself: this piece of symbolism has left deep marks throughout the entire history of marriage and is active in all the relationships of the two sexes.

Maybe woman is what man has made her; but this is an outside thing, a social tag, having reference only to her position in the world. Man has not touched woman’s soul. He cannot. There are many things which a man must learn that woman knows from the beginning. To love is one of them. Woman teaches man that, and he does not learn easily. And it is in these trials, these efforts of his to find himself, that woman contributes in so great a measure to the making or the marring, of the man. The soul of a man passes from the hollow of one woman’s hand to the hollow of another’s. He loves first that extension of himself called “mother,” and from her he passes on to other less individualised relationships. And each woman, with cruel hands or with kind, presses deep the imprint of her hold upon his plastic clay.

Yes, it is women who mould the lives of men as it is women who give them birth.

It is strangely difficult to induce in good women to-day a practical understanding of their almost limitless power over men. Each woman is able to create perpetually in the man she loves the qualities she desires; a power infinitely greater, as I believe, than can be ever gained through individual self-assertion.

And if woman feels this power of being the source of creating energy to man (and it belongs to all women, although many of them have lost the consciousness of their gift), this knowledge is the very centre of her being, the flame which feeds life; and she is intensely and supremely happy just in so far as she is steeped in sacrifice. I do not hope, however, to convince any woman who does not know within herself already the gladness of this service to man, and I diverge a little from my main subject in making these remarks.

A glance back at the beginnings of marriage should teach women a little modesty, for there we see that the wife’s constancy was directly dependent on the conditions of her marriage. Under the maternal form, where the husband lived in the home of the wife, her sexual liberty was in many cases greater than his. And there is abundant proof that full advantage was taken both by unmarried and married women of such freedom wherever it was allowed.[76] Woman is not instinctively inclined to virtue. And an inherent desire towards faithfulness in marriage has not, I am certain, always acted more strongly in women than it has in men; indeed, I am not sure that the opposite is not true.

The development of the personal relationship in marriage is intimately dependent on patriarchy. Again I am compelled to assert this truth. The establishment of paternity as a working and acknowledged fact was comparatively a late achievement. Under the conditions of the maternal clan, the family was incomplete; it consisted only of the mother and children. This was not a natural condition, and therefore was not permanent. The new stage was ushered in by what may perhaps be called “the social annunciation of paternity.” And this led eventually to the establishment of marriage in the form in which we understand it to-day.

Now for the first time the home was firmly founded. The father was the head of the domestic hearth: he was the priest of sacrifice at the domestic altar. His ancestors were present in the spirit and all the members of the family honoured them. And in their presence nothing unclean was tolerated. The wife at the moment when, as a bride, she crossed the threshold of the home, or was carried across it, gave up her own kindred and her own gods. Her husband’s home was now her home, his gods were her gods.[77]

So strong an insistence has been made on the evils of the wife’s subjection to the husband, which arose under this system of marriage, that we have lost sight of the enduring benefits that from the beginning to the end must be connected with it. There is much nonsense talked and written about the patriarchal home. Its conditions and rules were slowly established for the workable happiness of all its members, not, as is too often assumed, arbitrarily imposed by the will of men. The duties of the husband and the wife were regulated by tradition, and all the service in the home was a holy service. By fixing the father to the family and securing his protection and toil for the children a future stability as well as fuller happiness was made possible. I do not see that this advantage could have been gained, or can now be maintained, under any other form of marriage. Nature herself seems to condemn man in his capacity as father. So delicate is the bond which binds him to the child compared with the bond which binds the mother, so readily can he be pushed outside the circle of the family, where, as a member apart, he will inevitably seek his own interests and pleasure.

The most ancient form of marriage under father-right was polygamy. Wives and children were a source of wealth in primitive communities. As a rule there was a principal wife for the procreation of legitimate children, but in addition a wealthy man had several subordinate wives or concubines. Polygamy has always been dependent on the possession of property. The position of each wife and that of her children was fixed by custom, sometimes enforced by law; in no case was a man free from obligations in regard to any woman who had “been to him as a wife”; even an unfruitful and childless woman could not be cast aside without provision being made for her. It is important to remember this. However distasteful the idea of legalised polygamy must be, and I believe it is distasteful to the majority of women and men (and this not from ethical reasons, but on account of deep and instinctive desires), it is certain that an open recognition of unions outside of marriage does prevent an escape from sexual responsibility on the part of men. I shall consider this question in fuller detail in a later chapter,[78] just now we are concerned with the development of marriage.

Out of this patriarchal polygamy monogamic marriage gradually arose. The long upward process by which the change was accomplished cannot be stated here. One factor I would emphasise, as its force has never, I think, been sufficiently recognised. Polygamy tends to disappear with the development of the conception of fatherhood. As I have asserted already, the child is bound to its mother and belongs to her whatever the form of marriage, but the same force does not act in the case of the father. The child belongs to him much more closely under monogamy than under polygamy or any other form of marriage. Now men do want the possession of their children. Thus a desire to have many children by several wives gives place to the desire to have a closer connection with fewer children born of one loved wife. As the marriage relations become more firmly established the partners in each union are held more closely to each other and to their children, and are pledged to greater purity of life.

There were, of course, many causes that contributed to this result. Chastity, first imposed upon the wife because she was the property of her husband and might transgress this rule only with his permission, came in time to bind men, though for a different reason. For the limits set to the sexual freedom of women acted also on them, since they were thus deprived of the means of obtaining women for themselves, without violating the rights of other men.

In this and other ways we find that polygamy was threatened on many sides. As an accepted and legalised form of marriage it tends to disappear with the conditions under which social life is developed. Like the maternal marriage, and other primitive experiments in sexual associations, polygamy is not a form of marriage that can be regarded as a permanent expression of the marriage law: that is, it is experimental and suitable to special conditions; it is not a final form, growing up by custom from earlier practices, or one which strives for mastery and will not tolerate other co-existent forms. On the other hand, monogamy has always been characterised by the strongest self-assertion, and from the earliest times we find it triumphing, and more and more seeking to exclude other forms of marriage.

These facts of the past history of marriage need to be considered by those who seek to bring discredit on monogamous marriage. Various reformers, too frightenedly concerned with the present shortage of men, increasing as it will enormously the disproportion between the number of the two sexes, have jumped to the conclusion that polygamy is likely to be legalised in the near future. I do not believe it. At least, it will not be polygamy under the form we have known it in the past. Polygamy has always been connected with the property value of woman and is dependent upon wealth. For this reason, even if for no other, polygamy will not replace monogamous marriages. Such a marriage system could not be supported by war-impoverished countries. The remedy must be a different one, as presently I shall show.

There is a strange idea among some people that sexual happiness can be gained by breaking away from the traditional bonds; it is the visible sign of our confusion as a people and the want of happiness in our lives. We should not set at naught the experience of the ages. Polygamy is an institution which in the growth of civilisation belongs only to primitive or non-progressive states. No race or nation has ever risen to front rank, or even secondary rank, under this marriage system. Our preference for monogamy goes beyond laws and religions. It is that deeply rooted thing—a matter of racial experience and desire. It is the best way that we have yet found of men and women living together.

The individual household, where both parents share in the common interest of bringing up the children, is the foundation on which monogamy has been built up and on which it must stand. If the conditions of the home are seriously changed, and the duty of providing and caring for the children is taken out of the hands of either or of both parents, a change in marriage practice will follow. I do not think you can hold the one if you let the other go. For Westermarck is right, and children should not be regarded as the result of marriage, but rather marriage is the result of children. And love between parents implies duties and sorrows on each side; without this, love, even of the most passionate kind, loses its quality and tends to become an ephemeral or even a corrupt thing.

There is much stupidity in the view of many reformers of marriage who fail to see that, however hard it is to live faithfully as man and wife, the monogamic ideal of marriage does so appeal to our emotional nature, that men and women are seriously unhappy in trying to destroy it. Fortunately it is easier to talk of “love’s freedom” than it is to act as if it ever could be free. In spite of what advanced people say, some feeling of duty will always exist as long as it at all hurts us to hurt others. The immorality that says, “Do what you desire irrespective of others,” is as yet beyond most of us.

Attempts to solve these problems quickly are bound to fail. Intellectual revolutionists are, I think, too hopeful with regard to what may be done to produce a harmony of sexual needs. The optimism that once prevailed in economics is being transformed to sexual matters. Once people supposed that if every one followed his own interests, a harmony would automatically establish itself in the economy of society. Now they tend to say the same about sex. They put forward many solutions, but they do not as a rule make use of these solutions, even when they could, in their own lives. They say what they do not believe, either with conscious insincerity, or because they are ignorant of life and are used to trying to get effects with words.

Intellectual views of life and of what is right and wrong always tend to break people into groups, each struggling to explain everything according to one theory, built on a single principle. And as the result of caring so much for one thing people seem quite unable to grasp any facts that do not refer to their own one particular reform, they are not even able to consider it as part of a world in which there is anything else. All the evil in marriage is due to too large families and population pressing on the food supply, we are told by one class of enthusiasts, while others point to men’s tyranny over women. Votes for women would have a magical effect: men are all bad, say some. The father is a parasite, unnecessary except for his share in begetting the child; the mother is the one parent. All would be well if legal marriage were abolished and motherhood made free, is the view common among one class of reformers. Eugenical breeding and the sterilisation of the unfit is the remedy brought forward by others. Many suggest economic changes and the endowment of motherhood.

But the matter is not so simple as these reformers seem to believe. And I doubt if any outward change is really capable of producing the prompt kind of penny-in-the-slot results that its supporters claim that it can. The complexity of marriage, in particular, the occurrence of sexual disharmonies so present and active for misery to-day, are ignored by all intellectual reformers. It is because they have no emotional hold of life as a whole that they find it easy to squeeze all life into their magic theories. For myself I can see no sure remedy: and were I asked to state one, I could say only: “A few thousand years more of development: a growth towards consciousness and a fuller understanding of the meaning of life.”

Marriage is not a matter of abstract principles: it will always be difficult. If it is anything that can be stated, it is a social practice, preserving unity and order amongst those who find these qualities of service in the art of living. We should humble ourselves to accept the lessons of life, then we should be more careful of simple human needs.

A very slight knowledge of existing marriages is sufficient to convince even the most optimistic believer that true mating is hard. I do not believe that most marriages are unhappy, but I do know that only the very few are happy. With many partners, and even those who are passionate lovers, the attraction of sex always seems to fall short of its end; it draws the two together in a momentary self-forgetfulness, but for the rest it seems rather to widen their separateness; they are secret to one another in everything, united only in the sexual embrace.

And the man who has not found his way already to the soul of a woman by some other means, will not do so through the channels of sex. For a woman wants to be loved for what she is, not for what the man wants from her. And for this reason those men who have in them no faculty for friendship will be likely always to meet with coldness on the part of their wives in response to their continued ardour. Such men do not understand that despite all their sexual proneness they are psychologically impotent.

The word love is used in so general and indiscriminate a way to denote sometimes the most transitory impulse, and sometimes the most intimate and profound feeling, that a mass of misunderstanding arises. Love comes from the senses as well as from the soul, and the one emotion often is mistaken for the other. And what this serves to bring home to us is the dualism inherent in the marriages of a civilised age, in which the element of sexual masterfulness, being a natural expression of masculinity, is unintentionally active, a survival of very primitive instincts, which to-day struggle for mastery with newer emotions and sympathy, flaring up in a late expression to justify the need for sexual contrast.

It is, however, very necessary for me to guard against my meaning being mistaken, in case I should be thought to be supporting the view that men are less capable than women are of unselfish love, and feel only passion. I do not understand such a distinction. Possibly it is true that affection can exist without passion, though if by “passion” sex-feeling is meant, it certainly is not true; and assuredly passion is the great and important part of love—nay, rather, it is Love itself.

The truth is this: Women have been taught for generations to look on love from a standpoint of unreality, and when in marriage they are forced to face some great fact in life, they are shocked and disillusioned. It is useless for women to go on acting as if sex desire was something of which nice people ought to be ashamed. Marriage is really a contract in which the woman undertakes certain sexual duties as well as the man, and the woman has the advantage, for she possesses all that the man most wants.

We may not safely ask too much or too little from marriage or take too high or too low a view of it. But the Christian view of the nature of marriage is at once too materialistic and too ascetic. The ancient world looked on marriage as a religious duty. “To be mothers were women created, and to be fathers men.” Christianity permitted marriage, but only as a necessary evil against the temptations of lust. “It is better to marry than to burn.”

This is, of course, a long past story. But such hateful view of marriage has left in every Christian land an inheritance of evil. The sexual life was considered impure and a concession to the lower nature in man; true purity of life was to be attained only in celibacy. Small wonder that marriage, thus regarded as an escape from worse evil and a cover to laxity of sexual conduct, is often so immoral. We see at once that the main evil of this gross misunderstanding of love must have fallen upon women. The woman was there just to keep the man in condition and from sin. I can hardly over-estimate the disastrous consequences both to marriage and to women of this unholy view of the sexual relationship.

The false glorification of asceticism, which denies the true nature of marriage while at the same time professedly regarding marriage as a sacrament, has involved a corresponding and unhealthy classifying of love into higher and lower, the spiritual and the physical; and the action of this double standard in the sexual life has led, on the one side, to the setting up of a theoretical ideal of conduct which, as few are able to follow it, tends to become an empty form, and this, on the other side, has led to a hidden laxity, within marriage and outside it.

I have emphasised this question of the unholy ascetic view of marriage because of its unspeakable evil, not only for women, but for the waste it entails to the race. It is the basis of most of the failures and diseases in our sexual life. As you know, our moral and religious systems regard the body as the prison of the soul, and pay consequently no attention whatever to the body from the moral point of view. I desire a regeneration of all the instincts of the body through consciousness. I desire this much more for the health and happiness of women themselves than I do for the enjoyment of men.

But it is not going to be easy. The education of the senses is quite a new thing, and it is not even allowed to most women to possess them. The principle of “re-discovery” will have to be begun. We must teach woman that she wants love for herself; the man must not claim it from her as a right he has bought by marriage.

Most women and some men do not realise (at least, they do not openly acknowledge) the immense disturbing power of sex and the claims the sexual life makes at some time on us all. To hear many people talk you would think it were possible to free ourselves at will of all those troubles and prejudices of sex that are our heritage from an uncountable past. Love is something fiercer than hand-holding in the darkness of the cinema, or moon-gazing in the parks.

In fear we try to keep the blinds down so that love may be decently obscured. Yet how can we ever begin to understand and deal with these problems of sex unless we will admit all the instincts and tendencies which ever lead us backwards to the more elemental phases of life? The deepest of the emotions is sex, and its action, like all the emotions that are fundamental, may be traced into a thousand bye-paths of the ordinary experience of each of us; it exercises its influence on every period of our development, and works subconsciously to control our actions in endless ways that we refuse to acknowledge.

Hence the conflicts which manifest themselves so strangely and so fiercely in our lives. The emotional self refuses at times to be controlled by the reason self. Restraint cannot do much, and indeed, often brings deeper evil. For our unconscious selves are stronger than all the pretences we have set up by our conscious wills, either as individuals to encourage our own deceit or collectively as a nation in the hope of controlling conduct.

This is why so much that is said to-day about sexual conduct is so foolish. The real question is not what people ought to do, but what they actually do and want to do, and, therefore, are likely to go on doing. It is these facts that the reformers of marriage almost always fail to face.

Having said this much, you will readily understand why I regard as necessary for the morality of marriage some public recognition of the relationship, and some accepted standard of conduct in it. We cannot, remembering the inherent defectiveness of our wills, safely hesitate and experiment in the liberties we can allow and the limits we must set to a force so strong as sexual love. Still less can we allow to be done in secret and in shameful darkness things that we will not face in the light. The unregulated union in any form does not seem to me to be practicable. Our sexual relationships are, or ought to be, so hedged about by duties, obligations, and consequences, that sexual conduct can never be considered as a personal question, and any society that permits such a view, whether openly acknowledged or secretly accepted, opens the way to real immorality and great unhappiness.

Not all who cry “It is useless,” can do without the limiting safeguards of legal marriage. We still feel the serpent’s sting of jealousy, and the old questions, “Where do you come from?” “What have you been doing to-night?” “Who handled your body till daytime, while I watched and wept?” “In what bed did you lie and whom did you gladden with your smile?” are still felt in the heart, even if not uttered by the lips, of the most advanced and emancipated husbands and wives. For often we are forced into acts over which reason has no control. And our sex judgments are not merely moral, not just questions of understanding and forgiving, but also physical questions of the nerves, of the blood, of the fiercest instinct.

And marriage, I say, the old patriarchal marriage that the advanced people and the idealists alike scoff at, is necessary for most of us—it does through its checking influence help us, and, by setting clear limits and prescribing a fixed code of conduct, it certainly hinders, if it cannot destroy, irregular manifestations of love. Moreover it does, by its ideal of faithfulness and duty to one mate, turn the imagination to desire fidelity. It is not so much that we could not love others, but that we shall not want to do so. Our desire is the first necessity: all else will follow. It is the seed of everything that can grow up in marriage: it is the true magic power. And this desire is always active, every real marriage is a continual renewing of interest through love, and, if the partners are not interested in each other, they will seek for something else.

If we try to be faithful to one another in marriage, instead of outside of it, there will be for most of us a greater chance of enduring happiness than is likely under conditions where each individual couple sets up a standard of sexual conduct for themselves.

Our minds to-day are certainly in conflict, and, in my opinion, it will be impossible to make much change in all that is wrong without the refixing of moral standards. There is no kind of unity in our desires: we do not know what we want. We have broken down without building up. And when traditional rules for conduct are absent there must be confusion. For the existence of many standards, each with its own theory of what is good, is an evil which opens a clear way for license and unhappiness.

As I have tried to show, the two great faults of the modern reform movements connected with marriage and sexual conduct are their instability and externality. These faults are the direct result of too much intellectualism and too much individualism. We have gone astray because we have thought chiefly of our own immediate wants and been over eager for experience, without considering what the result of our action must be to others in the future. We have had no clear vision of evil and good. I feel almost that a mistaken vision—so long as it was a vision common to us all—would be better than no vision at all, which really is the result when each one of us gazes at our own particular star. This has been the blasting modern disease. And our inability to set up plain standards of right and wrong, with no ideals to strive after, has left vacant room for false ideals.

For I hold that the broad direction of our conduct follows straight from our faith. To believe in marriage is to want to do right in marriage. Then do we fail, and our own union comes to disaster, it will be a personal failure, not a collective failure; we shall blame ourselves, not the institution of marriage. And to have this faith in marriage as a people—not as a law imposed upon us, but a necessary binding that we accept of our own wills—will bring us again to be unified by a comprehending idea: an ideal of purpose and duty to one another and among us all in our sexual conduct, and in this way we shall be helped in right-doing. Carried onwards by a ruling motive, we shall find unity of desire, with its value to life of an absolute standard. It is for this reason I care so deeply that the monogamic ideal of marriage—the living faithfully to one mate in thought and deed—should be held sacred by us all: held sacred, however greatly we may fail as individuals to attain to this ideal. Our failures in faithful living may bring disaster to ourselves. But the institution of marriage can be hurt much more by the fading and loss of our belief in the duty of faithfulness.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER X
MONOGAMOUS MARRIAGE AND WOMAN: A CONTINUATION OF THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, WITH SOME REMARKS ON THE CHARACTER OF WOMAN