The present series of wars, it seems likely, will continue for twenty
or thirty years, and perhaps longer. That the first clash was
inconclusive was shown brilliantly by the preposterous nature of the
peace finally reached—a peace so artificial and dishonest that the
signing of it was almost equivalent to a new declaration of war. At
least three new contests in the grand manner are plainly insight—one
between Germany and France to rectify the unnatural tyranny of a weak
and incompetent nation over a strong and enterprising nation, one
between Japan and the United States for the mastery of the Pacific, and
one between England and the United States for the control of the sea.
To these must be added various minor struggles, and perhaps one or two
of almost major character: the effort of Russia to regain her old unity
and power, the effort of the Turks to put down the slave rebellion (of
Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, etc.)which now menaces them, the effort of
the Latin-Americans to throw off the galling Yankee yoke, and the joint
effort of Russia and Germany (perhaps with England and Italy aiding) to
get rid of such international nuisances as the insane Polish republic,
the petty states of the Baltic, and perhaps also most of the Balkan
states. I pass over the probability of a new mutiny in India, of the
rising of China against the Japanese, and of a general struggle for a
new alignment of boundaries in South America. All of these wars, great
and small, are probable; most of them are humanly certain. They will be
fought ferociously, and with the aid of destructive engines of the
utmost efficiency. They will bring about an unparalleled butchery of
men, and a large proportion of these men will be under forty years of
age.
As a result there will be a shortage of husbands in Christendom, and as
a second result the survivors will be appreciably harder to snare than
the men of today. Every man of agreeable exterior and easy means will
be pursued, not merely by a few dozen or score of women, as now, but by
whole battalions and brigades of them, and he will be driven in sheer
self-defence into very sharp bargaining. Perhaps in the end the state
will have to interfere in the business, to prevent the potential
husband going to waste in the turmoil of opportunity.
Just what form this interference is likely to take has not yet appeared
clearly. In France there is already a wholesale legitimization of
children born out of wedlock and in Eastern Europe there has been a
clamour for the legalization of polygamy, but these devices do not meet
the main problem, which is the encouragement of monogamy to the utmost.
A plan that suggests itself is the amelioration of the position of the
monogamous husband, now rendered increasingly uncomfortable by the laws
of most Christian states. I do not think that the more intelligent sort
of women, faced by a perilous shortage of men, would object seriously
to that amelioration. They must see plainly that the present system, if
it is carried much further, will begin to work powerfully against their
best interests, if only by greatly reinforcing the disinclination to
marriage that already exists among the better sort of men. The woman of
true discretion, I am convinced, would much rather marry a superior
man, even on unfavourable terms, than make John Smith her husband, serf
and prisoner at one stroke.
The law must eventually recognize this fact and make provision for it.
The average husband, perhaps, deserves little succour. The woman who
pursues and marries him, though she may be moved by selfish aims,
should be properly rewarded by the state for her service to it—a
service surely not to be lightly estimated in a military age. And that
reward may conveniently take the form, as in the United States, of
statutes giving her title to a large share of his real property and
requiring him to surrender most of his income to her, and releasing her
from all obedience to him and from all obligation to keep his house in
order. But the woman who aspires to higher game should be quite
willing, it seems to me, to resign some of these advantages in
compensation for the greater honour and satisfaction of being wife to a
man of merit, and mother to his children. All that is needed is laws
allowing her, if she will, to resign her right of dower, her right to
maintenance and her immunity from discipline, and to make any other
terms that she may be led to regard as equitable. At present women are
unable to make most of these concessions even if they would: the laws
of the majority of western nations are inflexible. If, for example, an
Englishwoman should agree, by an ante-nuptial contract, to submit
herself to the discipline, not of the current statutes, but of the
elder common law, which allowed a husband to correct his wife
corporally with a stick no thicker than his thumb, it would be
competent for any sentimental neighbour to set the agreement at naught
by haling her husband before a magistrate for carrying it out, and it
is a safe wager that the magistrate would jail him.
This plan, however novel it may seem, is actually already in operation.
Many a married woman, in order to keep her husband from revolt, makes
more or less disguised surrenders of certain of the rights and
immunities that she has under existing laws. There are, for example,
even in America, women who practise the domestic arts with competence
and diligence, despite the plain fact that no legal penalty would be
visited upon them if they failed to do so. There are women who follow
external trades and professions, contributing a share to the family
exchequer. There are women who obey their husbands, even against their
best judgments. There are, most numerous of all, women who wink
discreetly at husbandly departures, overt or in mere intent, from the
oath of chemical purity taken at the altar. It is a commonplace,
indeed, that many happy marriages admit a party of the third part.
There would be more of them if there were more women with enough
serenity of mind to see the practical advantage of the arrangement. The
trouble with such triangulations is not primarily that they involve
perjury or that they offer any fundamental offence to the wife; if she
avoids banal theatricals, in fact, they commonly have the effect of
augmenting the husband’s devotion to her and respect for her, if only
as the fruit of comparison. The trouble with them is that very few men
among us have sense enough to manage them intelligently. The masculine
mind is readily taken in by specious values; the average married man of
Protestant Christendom, if he succumbs at all, succumbs to some
meretricious and flamboyant creature, bent only upon fleecing him. Here
is where the harsh realism of the Frenchman shows its superiority to
the sentimentality of the men of the Teutonic races. A Frenchman would
no more think of taking a mistress without consulting his wife than he
would think of standing for office without consulting his wife. The
result is that he is seldom victimized. For one Frenchman ruined by
women there are at least a hundred Englishmen and Americans, despite
the fact that a hundred times as many Frenchmen engage in that sort of
recreation. The case of Zola is typical. As is well known, his amours
were carefully supervised by Mme. Zola from the first days of their
marriage, and in consequence his life was wholly free from scandals and
his mind was never distracted from his work.