Now most laws are, and all laws ought to be, stronger than the
strongest individual. Certainly the marriage law is. The only people
who successfully evade it are those who actually avail themselves of its
shelter by pretending to be married when they are not, and by Bohemians
who have no position to lose and no career to be closed. In every other
case open violation of the marriage laws means either downright ruin or
such inconvenience and disablement as a prudent man or woman would get
married ten times over rather than face. And these disablements and
inconveniences are not even the price of freedom; for, as Brieux has
shewn so convincingly in Les Hannetons, an avowedly illicit union is
often found in practice to be as tyrannical and as hard to escape from
as the worst legal one.
We may take it then that when a joint domestic establishment, involving
questions of children or property, is contemplated, marriage is in
effect compulsory upon all normal people; and until the law is altered
there is nothing for us but to make the best of it as it stands. Even
when no such establishment is desired, clandestine irregularities are
negligible as an alternative to marriage. How common they are nobody
knows; for in spite of the powerful protection afforded to the parties
by the law of libel, and the readiness of society on various other
grounds to be hoodwinked by the keeping up of the very thinnest
appearances, most of them are probably never suspected. But they are
neither dignified nor safe and comfortable, which at once rules them out
for normal decent people. Marriage remains practically inevitable; and
the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we shall set to work to make
it decent and reasonable.