233. The rights of husband over wife and father over children are
_(a)_ like that of property in being rights against all the world,
_(b)_ unlike it in being rights over _persons_, and therefore
reciprocal
234. The latter characteristic would be expressed by German writers
by saying that both the 'subject' and the 'object' of these rights
are persons
235. Three questions about them: (1) What makes man capable of family
life? (2) How does it come to have rights? (3) What ought the form of
those rights to be?
236. (1) The family implies the same effort after permanent
self-satisfaction as property, together with a permanent interest in
a particular woman and her children
237. The capacity for this interest is essential to anything which
can be rightly called family life, whatever lower forms of life may
historically have preceded it
238. (2) The rights of family life arise from the mutual recognition
of this interest by members of the same clan (in which the historical
family always appears as an element)
239. Its development has been in the direction _(a)_ of giving _all_
men and women the right to marry, _(b)_ of recognising the claims of
husband and wife to be _reciprocal_. Both these imply monogamy
240. Polygamy excludes many men from marriage and makes the wife
practically not a wife, while it also prevents real reciprocity of
rights both between husband and wife and between parents and children
241. The abolition of slavery is another essential to the development
of the true family life, in both the above respects
242. (3) Thus the _right_ (as distinct from the _morality_) of family
life requires _(a)_ monogamy, _(b)_ duration through life, _(c)_
terminability on the infidelity of husband or wife
243. Why then should not adultery be treated as a crime? Because
(unlike other violations of right) it is generally in the public
interest that it should be condoned if the injured person is willing
to condone it
244. Nor would the higher purposes of marriage be served by making
infidelity penal, for they depend on disposition, not on outward acts
or forbearances
245. All that the state can do, therefore, is to make divorce for
adultery easy, and to make marriage as serious a matter as possible
246. _(b)_ Should divorce be allowed except for adultery? Sometimes
for lunacy or cruelty, but not for incompatibility, the object of the
state being to make marriage a 'consortium omnis vitae'.