However much we may all suffer through marriage, most of us think
so little about it that we regard it as a fixed part of the order of
nature, like gravitation. Except for this error, which may be regarded
as constant, we use the word with reckless looseness, meaning a dozen
different things by it, and yet always assuming that to a respectable
man it can have only one meaning. The pious citizen, suspecting the
Socialist (for example) of unmentionable things, and asking him heatedly
whether he wishes to abolish marriage, is infuriated by a sense of
unanswerable quibbling when the Socialist asks him what particular
variety of marriage he means: English civil marriage, sacramental
marriage, indissoluble Roman Catholic marriage, marriage of divorced
persons, Scotch marriage, Irish marriage, French, German, Turkish, or
South Dakotan marriage. In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized
countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties wish it,
without any question of conduct. That is what marriage means in Sweden.
In Clapham that is what they call by the senseless name of Free Love.
In the British Empire we have unlimited Kulin polygamy, Muslim polygamy
limited to four wives, child marriages, and, nearer home, marriages
of first cousins: all of them abominations in the eyes of many worthy
persons. Not only may the respectable British champion of marriage mean
any of these widely different institutions; sometimes he does not
mean marriage at all. He means monogamy, chastity, temperance,
respectability, morality, Christianity, anti-socialism, and a dozen
other things that have no necessary connection with marriage. He often
means something that he dare not avow: ownership of the person of
another human being, for instance. And he never tells the truth about
his own marriage either to himself or any one else.
With those individualists who in the mid-XIXth century dreamt of doing
away with marriage altogether on the ground that it is a private concern
between the two parties with which society has nothing to do, there
is now no need to deal. The vogue of "the self-regarding action" has
passed; and it may be assumed without argument that unions for the
purpose of establishing a family will continue to be registered and
regulated by the State. Such registration is marriage, and will continue
to be called marriage long after the conditions of the registration
have changed so much that no citizen now living would recognize them as
marriage conditions at all if he revisited the earth. There is therefore
no question of abolishing marriage; but there is a very pressing
question of improving its conditions. I have never met anybody really
in favor of maintaining marriage as it exists in England to-day. A Roman
Catholic may obey his Church by assenting verbally to the doctrine of
indissoluble marriage. But nobody worth counting believes directly,
frankly, and instinctively that when a person commits a murder and is
put into prison for twenty years for it, the free and innocent husband
or wife of that murderer should remain bound by the marriage. To put it
briefly, a contract for better for worse is a contract that should not
be tolerated. As a matter of fact it is not tolerated fully even by the
Roman Catholic Church; for Roman Catholic marriages can be dissolved,
if not by the temporal Courts, by the Pope. Indissoluble marriage is an
academic figment, advocated only by celibates and by comfortably married
people who imagine that if other couples are uncomfortable it must be
their own fault, just as rich people are apt to imagine that if other
people are poor it serves them right. There is always some means of
dissolution. The conditions of dissolution may vary widely, from those
on which Henry VIII. procured his divorce from Katharine of Arragon to
the pleas on which American wives obtain divorces (for instance, "mental
anguish" caused by the husband's neglect to cut his toenails); but
there is always some point at which the theory of the inviolable
better-for-worse marriage breaks down in practice. South Carolina has
indeed passed what is called a freak law declaring that a marriage shall
not be dissolved under any circumstances; but such an absurdity will
probably be repealed or amended by sheer force of circumstances before
these words are in print. The only question to be considered is, What
shall the conditions of the dissolution be?