It is notable that men are but seldom truly fond of, nor are they faithful to the wife who works outside the home. In France, where the clever, industrious wife of the middle and lower classes is more a business-partner than she is a wife, conjugal fidelity is not expected.
Not only is a house without a woman in it to devote her best interests and powers to the arts of home-making, not a home, but the bond of that fraction of interest and affection left over to her from her work outside it is a thing too slight to bind her husband to her. He finds no difficulty in substituting—should he seek this—a haven with more atmosphere of home and sentiment in it, companionship with more of temperament in it, more resiliency and freshness, than that of the industrious and wage-earning, but fatigued and jaded working-wife.
The children of such a union—if such there be—supply no bond either to draw together and unite their parents. Children reared by servants, without understanding or affection, are but seldom affectionate or charming. Moreover, the children of hard-working mothers are but seldom true children. They bring to the home nothing of the freshness, the vitality or charm of natural childhood.
If father and mother possess æsthetic sensibilities, these are offended probably by the plainness and the lack of graces in their offspring—bye-products merely of their economic assiduities. Perhaps the big spectacles through which the young eyes gaze forth like doleful prisoners from behind bars, make them feel strangely uncomfortable; as in the presence of weird and reproachful intelligences.
Neither derives interest or joy enough from the family circle to repay them for their parental obligations and responsibilities.
IX
Love between the sexes, being a need alike of souls and biogenesis, is regarded by some as reason enough in itself for relaxing the Marriage-law—even for the abolition of Marriage; making affection the sole bond between the lovers.
We cannot, logically, abolish the legal contract uniting two persons in marriage, however, without at the same time abolishing every other form of legal contract, and the legal liabilities thereof. Logically, we cannot make conjugal duty and family responsibility mere matters of personal conscience, unless we are assured that the human species has reached such a phase of moral integrity as to need no other incentive than its own integrity to secure fulfilment of its obligations, moral and material. If we abolish the legal factor in marriage, to be consistent we must abolish the legal factor in business partnerships and in all other sociological compacts. We must make the payment of rent, of rates and taxes, of tradesmen's bills and so forth, debts of conscience and of honour merely; for the discharge whereof conscience and honour must alone suffice.
It may be objected that these are purely material obligations, while the bond between the sexes is an emotional one. And yet—Have we reached such a stage of development that emotional considerations are more binding on us than material ones are?
Moreover, if we are to make love the sole bond—clearly the waning of love must release from the bondage. Further, when we sift out the purely emotional element in the vast majority of unions, we shall find it but a very slender factor among other more binding reciprocities. Certainly a far more slender thread to trust to in the safeguarding of a contract than is, for example, the factor of commercial honesty. Commercial honesty is not, perhaps, a conspicuous virtue of the times. Nevertheless, the sense of honesty in business is a good deal stronger in most men than is their sense of honour with regard to love. And their sense of honour in love has developed mainly as a direct consequence of those legal compulsions and responsibilities of love which have been exacted and fostered by the legality of marriage.