The Feminist fallacy that prostitution is almost entirely a product of male economics has been strikingly refuted, too, by War-conditions, which opened numerous well-remunerated employments for the sex. Yet, coincident with a sad deficit of women to fill these, prostitution has waxed rampant.
Wise and discreet were those early Victorians, with their uncompromising ostracism of loose women. Apart altogether from such salutary expression of their condemnation of impure living, they were vastly too clever and far-seeing to admit persons of notoriously evil habit, peeress or actress, to association with their clean young girls, as modern mothers do; to meet and to mix freely with them socially or at Charity Bazaars, on Flag-Days, and so forth. With the result that girls all the world over have become increasingly lax and decadent in tone and manner, in dress and morale, from confusion of their young standards by social tolerance and recognition of such persons, as also from corruption by demoralising contact with and observation of such.
Intolerance? Pharisaism? By no means!
The strong and straight, uncompromising moral standards of its women serve as landmarks of, and impulse to a nation's progress. Clear and definite lines of demarcation between good and evil, between possible and impossible modes of conduct, point the moral of advance, and turn the scale in the upward direction for the weak, the hesitating, and the imitative.
Dread of consequences went far, in less sophisticated days, to safeguard and foster womanly virtue. Modern expedients have, unfortunately, removed all cause for fear in this relation; permitting an impunity of action demoralising to the weak in will or principle, who require every possible aid and check to guide them aright. In simpler days, girls who had lapsed were steadied and strengthened in character and self-restraint by the compulsion to support, as too by their natural fondness for the unwanted child. Now the first step—having cost them nothing—predisposes to further backslidings. And both character and self-control degenerate increasingly.
VII
To weaken the marriage-bond by setting it for a term of years only, or by making it terminable by consent, would virtually destroy marriage and family-life. The fact that the bond would not be binding would make persons more careless even than they are at present in selection of the mate, and would thus multiply the number of mis-matings. Which would be still further to deteriorate species, since the finer types of children are born only of well-mated parents.
The finality of the bond, if it does not always prevent one or both from meeting some other they prefer, prevents the scrupulous, at all events, from seeking such. Or having found, it keeps many from fostering and from yielding to temptation. Were marriage terminable, or, as is sometimes proposed, were it abolished wholly, and love the only bond between the sexes, there would be no confidence, no sense of security between the partners, no stability of family life; no centring of interests in this, and but small endeavour to retain affections which for the many could be easily replaced—and replaced, moreover, with the zest of novelty. On the contrary, a curse of unrest would afflict the vast majority of married folk with the unsettling—mayhap with the alluring—prospect of meeting their further "Fate"; perhaps their second, possibly their third, it might be, their seventh "Fate."
Only the few are strong enough of heart or stable enough of character to remain steadfast for a lifetime in any undertaking, unless bound stringently thereto by authorised obligations, incentives, and penalties. Only the few are deep enough of nature to love for a lifetime; or are deep enough of nature to love so intensely as to justify altering the marriage-code in order to spare these few suffering. The wane of nine out of ten honeymoons impresses the value of an inflexible decree that declines to reckon with disillusion, but sternly bids the disillusioned take up their burden and make the best of it. And having no choice, many do this and make a success of it—on new, and, it may be, on far higher lines than those they had set out upon.
That but few love so deeply as to love for life by no means implies that marriage for less than a lifetime should be substituted. It shows, on the contrary, that the majority of persons would prove as incapable of loving No. Two for long as they had been incapable of loving No. One; or as they would be incapable of loving No. Three, or No. Ten. A bond that rivets them for life to No. One therefore, and entails loss or suffering when they fail to abide by it, is safeguard for them against such a succession of loves as would be as demoralising to the individual as it must be destructive of society.