How many men are there, for example, who, having come to care for some other, hold themselves bound in the least by an illicit tie; howsoever much they may have cared at one time for the woman in the case? Lightly come—lightly go! And if the terms, marriage and love, are by no means necessarily synonymous, it has been, nevertheless, greatly by way of the obstacles and compulsions and the social penalties attaching to violation of the marriage vows that the love-passion has been purified and uplifted out of the barbarism of mere instinct and promiscuity, into the graces of emotion and the virtues of monogamy.
Had any man and woman, reciprocally attracted at their first meeting, been free always to have carried this attraction straightway to its biological conclusion, the sex-relation would be still the merely physiological incident it was in primal forests. The circumstance that such attraction has been debarred from ready consummation by the obligations and the obstacles engendered by a recognised and legalised bond between the sexes, has been debarred, moreover, in innumerable cases, by one of the attracted couple being subject to this bond—all of this has preserved the nascent emotion from straightway relapsing to the basic level whence it sprang, and has fostered the evolution of love in the higher reaches of emotion; of imagination, of controlled and chastened passion.
It may be said that modern men and women, loving one another with the more highly-evolved passion of our enlightened epoch, would love as devotedly and would remain as constant in an illicit as in a legalised union. If so, such constancy would be an echo mainly of the long-dignified state of wedded constancy; and the greatest of all tributes to the values of this. Nevertheless—For how long after the clarion-note of aspiration sounded by Marriage should have ceased to vibrate, would the echo of it last?
Should woman, in her short-sighted efforts to "emancipate" herself still further, release herself wholly (as she now inclines to do) from the marriage-bond, she will have thrown back in man's face the very tenderest guerdon of his worth and of his high regard for her. And she will have destroyed, at a blow, his most vital incentive to further advance, her own and her children's most powerful safeguard, and the main buttress not alone of national but, as well, of Natural human progress.
CHAPTER VI
FEMINIST DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE DISASTROUS TO INFANT-LIFE AND HUMAN FACULTY
"A hundred men may make an encampment, but it takes a woman to make a home."—Chinese Proverb.
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