feeling of sin which marks the Protestantism of our own time as compared
with that of earlier centuries. I do not mean that people are any more
sinful than they were—probably they are not. They were sinful enough in
the seventeenth century. But wrong-doing presents itself more frequently
to all but the most pious minds rather as something unworthy, something
below their standard of honour, something disapproved by public opinion,
than as something which deserves the wrath of God, and affects their
true relation to Him as their Father. Thus the element of sin in any
breach, be it slight or be it grave, of conjugal duty, would seem to be
less present to the conscience of the average husband or wife now than
it was formerly, at least if we are to take the literature (including
the theological literature) of former times, when set beside that of our
own, to be any guide.
The inquiry how far any similar change has passed upon sentiment in
Roman Catholic peoples would lead us far, nor am I competent to pursue
it. The conception of sin itself is not quite the same thing to pious
Catholics as it is, or was, to pious Protestants. But, broadly speaking,
marriage doubtless retains to Roman Catholics, and to the Orthodox
church of the East, more of a sacred character than it does to
Protestants, and the change in this respect from the sixteenth to the
nineteenth century is doubtless greater among Protestants.
XXI. TENDENCIES AFFECTING THE PERMANENCE OF THE MARRIAGE TIE.
In most countries, and notably in England and the United States, married
women have obtained power over their own property, including their
earnings, and are now less dependent upon their husbands for support
than they were formerly.
In most countries married women have far greater personal independence
than in earlier days. They can dispose of their lives as they please,
and are permitted both by law and by usage an always increasing freedom
of going where and doing what they will. For social purposes, they are
in England (at least those who belong to the upper and middle classes
are), and still more in the United States, though somewhat less in such
countries as Germany and Sweden, entirely the equals of men, so that the
retention of the promise to obey in the marriage service of the English
Church excites amusement by its discrepancy from the facts.
Over and above these changes directly affecting the matrimonial
relation, there are other changes which have modified life and thought.
The old deference to custom and tradition, and therewith the stability
of the social structure as a whole, have been weakened. Men move much
more from place to place, so their minds have grown less settled. The
habit of reading, and in particular the excessive reading of newspapers,
may have produced a quickness of apprehension, but it has been
accompanied by a measure of volatility and inconstancy in opinion. These
in their turn have bred a liking for novelty and excitement, and have
confirmed the disposition to question old-established doctrines. There
is an increase, especially among women, of the things called
‘self-consciousness’ and ‘nervous tension.’ Both men and women are more
excitable, and women in particular are more fastidious. Pleasures other
than material are probably more appreciated, but the desire for
pleasure, and the belief that every one has a right to it, seem to be
stronger and more widely diffused than ever before. Some will perhaps
add that, in an age when the belief in a future state of rewards and
punishments is less deep and less general than it once was, the desire
to have out of this life all the pleasure it can be made to yield is
naturally stronger; yet I doubt whether beliefs regarding a future life
have ever influenced men’s conduct so much as the whilom universality of
those beliefs might lead us to assume.
All these tendencies are partly due to, and are certainly much increased
by, that aggregation of population into great cities which makes one of
the most striking contrasts between our time and the ages which formed
English and American character. It is in industrial and progressive
communities, such as those of Germany, Belgium, France, and England,
that these tendencies are most pervasive and effective. They are even
more pervasive and multiform in the United States than in Europe. It
would be strange indeed if they did not affect the theory and the
practice of domestic relations and the conception of the family. And
their influence will evidently be greatest in the country where the
ideas of democratic equality, and the notion that every human being may
claim certain indefeasible ‘human rights,’ have struck deepest root.
The idea that men and women are entitled to happiness, and therefore to
have barriers to their happiness removed, is strong in the United
States, and has gone far to prompt both the indulgence of the laws and
the over-indulgence shown in administering them. This idea has its good
side. The fuller recognition of the right of women to develop their
individuality and be more than mere appendages to men is one of the
conspicuous gains which the last two or three generations have brought.
It has helped to raise the conception of what marriage should be, so we
must expect to find that it has made women less tolerant of an
unsympathetic or unworthy partner than they were in the eighteenth
century.
It would not therefore be wonderful if, even apart from such facilities
as legislation has allowed, and assuming that there was one and the same
divorce law over all civilized countries, the United States should show,
as Switzerland shows in Europe, an exceptionally high percentage of
divorces to marriages. Newspapers are more read there than in any other
country; and newspapers contain a great deal about matrimonial troubles
which would be better left unpublished. The life of the middle class is
more full of stir and change and excitement than it is in Europe. Both
the process described as the emancipation of women, and the admission of
women to various professions and employments formerly confined to men,
have gone further there than in Europe. So has the carrying on of
industries in factories instead of at home. So has the habit of living
in hotels or boarding-houses.
All these conditions are less favourable than were the conditions of a
century ago to the maintenance of domestic life on the old lines. And
over and above these, there has come that extreme laxity of the law and
of judicial procedure which has been already described. Thus we can
easily account for the comparative frequency of divorce in the United
States, while yet noting, for this is the point of real importance, that
the phenomena of the United States are not isolated, but merely the most
conspicuous instance of a tendency which is at work everywhere, and
which springs from some widely diffused features of modern life.
The points of similarity between the history of divorce at Rome and its
history in recent times need not be further insisted on. There is,
however, one to which I have not yet adverted. At Rome the increase of
conjugal infidelity and that of divorce would seem, from such data as
law and literature give us, to have gone on together, each fostering the
other. Is there any like connexion discoverable now?
This is a question which it appears impossible to answer either
generally or for any particular country. There are no statistics
available, except for matrimonial causes coming into the Courts, and we
can never tell what proportion the offences that are disclosed bear to
those which remain hidden. There have been countries where the level of
sexual morality was extremely low, at least among the wealthier classes,
though no divorce was permitted. There may be countries where the very
fact that the level is low keeps down the number of applications to the
Court, because the injured party acquiesces and takes his or her revenge
in like offences. Common talk, and literature which as regards the past
may sometimes represent nothing more than common talk[231], are unsafe
guides, as any one will see who asks himself how much he knows about the
moral state of his own country in his own time. He can form some sort of
guess about the character of the ‘social set’ he moves in, but how
little after all does he know about the classes above or below his own!
Thus there can be very few persons in England whose means of information
entitle them to say that the undoubted increase of divorce cases in our
Courts since 1860 represents any decline in the average conjugal
morality of the people. As regards the United States, I have heard the
most opposite views expressed with equal confidence by persons who ought
to have been equally well-informed. Judicial statistics do not prove
that infidelity has become more common there, for the largest proportion
of divorces granted is for desertion, 38.5 per cent. of the whole, those
for infidelity being little more than half of that percentage, or about
one-fifth of the whole. At the same time the smallness of this
percentage may count for less than might appear, for it is probable that
in States where divorce can be obtained for other grounds, less serious
and easier to prove than infidelity is, petitioners will, where they
have a choice of several charges to make, put forward a less grave
charge provided it is sufficient to secure their object. So far as my
own information goes, the practical level of sexual morality is at least
as high in the United States as in any part of northern or western
Europe (except possibly among the Roman Catholic peasantry of Ireland),
and experienced judges in America have told me that, odious as they find
the divorce work of their courts, the thing which strikes them in the
cases they deal with is more frequently the caprice and fickleness, the
irritability and querulous discontent of couples who have married on
some passing fancy, than a proclivity to breaches of wedded troth.
-----
Footnote 231:
Sometimes not even that. A few years ago, in the United States Senate,
some one quoted, in order to prove the corruption of public life in
England, a play represented there, in which a Secretary of State or
his wife was involved in a disgraceful job connected with an Indian
railway. Nobody in England had taken such a thing seriously enough to
comment on the absurdity of it.
-----
Indeed, so far from holding that marriages are more frequently unhappy
in the United States than in western Europe, most persons who know both
countries hold the opposite to be the case. On the whole, therefore,
there seems no ground for concluding that the increase of divorce in
America necessarily points to a decline in the standard of domestic
morality, except perhaps in a small section of the wealthy class, though
it must be admitted that if this increase should continue, it may tend
to induce such a decline.
The same conclusion may well be true regarding the greater frequency of
divorce all over the world. There is no reason to think that sexual
passion leading to conjugal infidelity is any commoner than formerly
among mankind. More probably passion is tending to grow rather weaker
than it was formerly. But that which we call Individualism, viz. the
desire of each person to do what he or she pleases, to gratify his or
her tastes, likings, caprices, to lead a life which shall be
uncontrolled by another’s will—this grows stronger. So, too, whatever
stimulates the susceptibility and sensitiveness of the nervous system
tends to make tempers more irritable, and to produce causes of friction
between those who are in constant contact. Here is a source of trouble
that is likely to grow with the growing strain of life, and with the
larger proportion which other interests bear in modern life to those
home interests which formerly absorbed nearly the whole of a woman’s
thoughts. It is temper rather than unlawful passion that may prove in
future the most dangerous enemy to the stability of the marriage
relation.
XXII. INFLUENCE OF THE CHURCH AND THE LAW.
The view of marriage as a tie which the parties intend to enter into for
their lives, and which the law holds indissoluble, has hitherto rested
not so much on any abstract theory or sentiment which men and women have
entertained regarding it as upon the three authorities which have formed
both sentiment and opinion. These three are the Church, the State, and
Tradition, that is to say the beliefs which people adopt because they
have come down from the past. The attitude of the Church has in
Protestant nations sensibly altered. In some countries it altered in the
sixteenth century. It has everywhere altered in the nineteenth. So, too,
the support given to the old view by the State has in like manner become
in those same countries much weaker, and in some countries, as for
example in Switzerland and many American States, has almost disappeared.
Public opinion has itself been largely formed by the Church and the Law,
and may, when they have ceased to form it, be no longer an effective
guardian of the permanence and dignity of marriage. In such democracies
as those of the United States, the wish of an active minority to procure
changes in the law easily prevails, because no one cares to resist, and
because abstract principles suggest that the more everybody is permitted
to do as he pleases, the happier everybody will be. When the law has
been changed, public opinion, that is to say the opinion of the majority
who do not think seriously about the matter, soon adjusts itself to the
new law, and little social blame attaches to those who use the licence
which the law has granted. Seeing then how largely the law, whether of
the Church or of the State, moulds the sentiment of the people on such a
subject as this, and seeing that the Church no longer makes or
administers law in Protestant countries, one may say that the civil law
is practically left to keep their conscience. This tendency of the
Church to abnegate its old functions makes the question of the way in
which the Law should deal with divorce a question of critical
importance[232].
-----
Footnote 232:
Some of the Churches in the United States have however tried to deal
with the matter. The Protestant Episcopal Church is at this moment
(1901) considering a draft canon.
-----
As regards America, the opinion of the wisest and best informed people,
though far from unanimous in points of detail, agrees in thinking that
many States have gone too far in the way of laxity.
XXIII. DOES THE ENGLISH LAW OF DIVORCE NEED AMENDMENT?
In England the topic has been less discussed; yet there are some who
hold that women ought to be placed on the same footing as men, and
allowed to obtain a divorce from an unfaithful husband, even if he has
not been guilty of cruelty. Others would go even further and admit other
grounds as entitling either party to a dissolution of the marriage. The
late Lord Hannen, whose opinion was entitled to exceptional weight, for
he had presided over the English Divorce Court for many years with
singular ability and fairness, told me that he thought the English law
might with advantage be somewhat relaxed, so numerous were the cases in
which it was obviously best that a miserable marriage should be
extinguished altogether. Yet the example of the United States (not to
speak of Rome) suggests the danger of any but a very slow and cautious
advance in that direction. Great as is the hardship of chaining an
innocent to a vicious or drunken or brutal consort, the evil of
permitting people to get rid of one another merely because they are
tired of one another is no less evident. When the question is asked,
‘What is the best divorce law?’ the only answer can be, ‘There is no
good divorce law.’ There are some faults in human nature which always
have existed and apparently always will exist; and there is no
satisfactory method of dealing with them. All that can be done is to
choose between different evils.
Upon the whole, after weighing the considerations on both sides, the
balance seems to incline to a change in the law which should not only
equalize the position of the wife and the husband, by giving the former
the same right to dissolution as the latter, but should also allow
dissolution in cases of hopeless lunacy and of long-continued desertion.
Throughout this discussion it has been assumed that marriages ought to
be permanent, and that obstacles should be thrown in the way of those
who seek to dissolve them. It may be asked whether this assumption is
justified. There is a school of thought, small perhaps, but of long
standing and supported by a few eminent names, which insists that
marriage should last no longer than love does; and therefore that the
pair should, as in Rome, be permitted to separate with freedom of
re-marriage, whenever they are no longer held together by inclination.
There is also a larger school, which feels so keenly the misery caused
by ill-assorted unions as to think that the parties should be allowed to
dissolve them, when certain terms for reflection and repentance
prescribed by law have been completed.
I do not propose to argue afresh this question, for it has been often
and copiously argued. Yet it is not a question to be dismissed without
argument, for in our day no moral or religious dogma, however long
established or widely held, is permitted to rest upon authority alone.
But to argue it fully would draw us far from the historical inquiry we
have been engaged on. It is enough to indicate in a word or two the main
grounds which have in fact led the vast majority of thoughtful men to
the assumption aforesaid. The first of these is the interest of
children. Few things can be more harmful to the moral well-being of the
offspring of a marriage than the divorce of their parents, which
destroys one or other of the two best influences that work on childhood
and may poison even the influence that is left. The next is the fact
that, though it is professedly in the interest of suffering wives that
facility of divorce is usually advocated, such facility tends to the
injury of wives even more than of husbands, because men are, it would
seem, more fickle and more prone to seek the dissolution of marriage
when they are tired of their partner, or have formed some illicit
connexion, or seek to marry some other woman. The third is that whatever
weakens the conception of the marriage tie as a permanent one strikes at
the whole character and essence of the marriage relation. It is often
said that when people know they have got to live together, they are
forced to exercise the self-control necessary to enable them to live
together. But the moral effect of the sense of permanence in wedded
union goes deeper than this. It is in the complete identification of the
two beings and the two lives that the true happiness of a happy marriage
lies. The sense that each has absolutely committed himself or herself to
the other—each taking charge of the joys and sorrows and hopes of the
other, each trusting to the other his or her joys and sorrows and
hopes—gives to the relation an incomparable sanctity, and makes the
strongest possible appeal to the best feelings of each. If selfishness
and falsehood can be overcome by anything, it is by calling into action
the sense of obligation to fulfil this trust which the enduring nature
of the union is calculated to inspire. Were the union to cease to be
thought of as enduring, were it to be in the minds of the parties, as
their minds are moulded by the practice and the prevailing notions of
society, merely the result and expression of a possibly transient
passion, or of the willingness to try the experiment of a joint
household, the sanctity and the sense of obligation would receive an
irreparable blow.
Thus we are driven to the conclusion that numerous as the cases may be
in which, if one looked only at the wretchedness of the parties to an
ill-assorted union, one might desire to see that union dissolved, more
harm than good may on the whole result from permitting the parties to
dissolve their union at their pleasure, as the later Romans did, as the
French did during the Revolution, and as some American States
practically do to-day; and more harm than good may result even from
extending in large measure the opportunities for divorce which the law
of England or that of Scotland at this moment affords.
How vital to the future of humanity are the interests involved is
admitted on all hands by those who would change, as well as by those who
would uphold, the conception of marriage as a permanent relation. Great
as is the contrast between that sensual and unworthy view which finds
its expression in the polygamy of the East and the view which
Christianity has formed among Western peoples, it is hardly greater than
that which exists between the view of marriage as a life-union,
dissoluble only when infidelity has shattered its basis, and the view
which puts it at the mercy of the caprice of a volatile nature or the
temper of an irritable one. Polygamy has been and remains a blighting
influence on Musulman society, and on the character of individual
Musulmans. So if marriage were to become a transitory relation, as it
practically was among the upper classes in the Roman Empire, the effects
upon family life and on the character of men and women would in the long
run be momentous.
XXIV. SOME GENERAL REFLECTIONS: CHANGES IN THEORY AND IN SENTIMENT
REGARDING MARRIAGE.
A few words more to sum up the general result of our survey. We have
seen that the relations of the wife to the husband have been regulated
sometimes by one, sometimes by the other of two systems, which have been
called those of Subordination and Equality[233]. In all countries custom
and law begin with the system of Subordination. In some, the wife is
little better than a slave. Even at Rome, though she was not only free
but respected, her legal capacity was merged in her husband’s.
-----
Footnote 233:
By Equality I do not mean any recognition of Identity or even
Similarity as respects capacity and practical work (though the
tendency is in that direction), but the equal possession of private
civil rights and the admission of an individuality entitled to equal
respect and an equally free play of action. Such Equality is perfectly
compatible, given sufficient affection, with a complete identification
of the consorts in the harmony which comes of the union of diverse but
complementary elements.
-----
This system vanishes from Rome during the last two centuries of the
Republic, and when the law of Rome comes to prevail over the whole
civilized world, the system of Equality (except so far as varied by
local custom) prevails over that world till the Empire itself perishes.
In the Dark Ages the principle of the subordination of the wife is again
the rule everywhere, though the forms it takes vary, and it is more
complete in some countries than in others. It was the rule among the
Celtic and Teutonic peoples before they were Christianized. It finds its
way, through customs conformable to the rudeness of the times, into the
law of those countries which, like Italy, Spain, and France, were only
partially Teutonized, and retained forms of Latin speech. It holds its
ground in England till our own time, though latterly much modified by
the process which we call the emancipation of women, a process which,
under the influence of democratic ideas, has moved most swiftly and has
gone furthest among the English race in North America. But in our own
time the principle of equality has, in most civilized countries,
triumphed all along the line, and so far as we can foresee, has
definitely triumphed. One must imagine a complete revolution in ideas
and in social habits in order to imagine a return to the system of
Subordination as it stood two centuries ago.