I have now examined the monogamic marriage of the positive man and the positive woman in all its more important aspects. Wisdom would seem, at all costs, to advocate the salvage of monogamic marriage from the wreckage of modern society. But before marriage can be saved and handed on as a valuable institution to the New Age, it must be reformed and established on a sounder basis. To continue along our present lines, without correcting our attitude towards marriage and some of the most rigorous customs that govern it, is simply to steer our course headlong back into sexual promiscuity, anarchy and chaos. No reform of modern marriage, or of the ideas that cluster about it, can possibly achieve any good, however, which does not satisfactorily meet every one of the objections I have advanced against it. To proceed, as we are now proceeding, by making the dissolution of marriage easier, is only one step farther in the direction of barbaric promiscuity. No readjustment can avail that does not go to the root of the problems involved; and although it may certainly be legitimate to inquire whether, at this late hour in our torrential degeneration, it is worth while making any reforms in anything, it does not alter the fact that if marriage is to be saved, all the objections to it that have been raised in this chapter will require to be fairly and seriously faced.

Since, however, the sex question is so fundamental as to be almost of primary importance; since the building of the social unit, the ideal family, constitutes the first elementary task in all sound social organization, it is not impossible, fantastic though it may seem, that wise and thorough reform in this department of life may alone prove the best means of rescuing Western Civilization itself.

FOOTNOTES:

[50] When I use the word “unnatural” here, I should like it to be understood as meaning “unnatural to human beings,” for, as we know, “nearly all rapacious animals, even the stupid vultures, are monogamous,” certain monkeys are so too; but no anthropologist would argue that monogamic marriage was natural to man.

[51] The proportion of those who do not wait, to those who do, may be judged to some extent from the following figures:—

Legitimate and illegitimate births in England and Wales during the nine years 1911-19.

Legitimate.Illegitimate.
1911.843,50537,633
1912.835,20937,528
1913.843,98137,909
1914.841,76737,329
1915.778,36936,245
1916.747,38137,689
1917.631,18937,157
1918.621,20941,452
1919.650,56241,876

[52] See Ch. Letourneau, The Evolution of Marriage (London, 1891): “Christianity, which taught that the earthly country was of no account, and taxed with impurity all that related to sexual union, made marriage a sacrament, and consequently an institution quite apart from humble considerations of social utility.... We shall see how hurtful the influence of Christianity has been on marriage, and we shall come to the conclusion that in order to manage earthly affairs well, it is not good to keep our looks constantly raised to the skies” (pp. 205-6). See also p. 245: “Abandoning the modest reality, it [Christianity] lost anchor from the first and was drowned in a sea of dreams. Marriage, instead of being simply the union of a man and woman in order to produce children, became mystic.”

[53] As we shall point out later, these romantic obsessions in regard to matrimony are chiefly Woman’s work.

[54] See the interesting treatise entitled The Grammar of Life by my friend Dr. G. T. Wrench (Heinemann, 1908), p. 218.