Girls who have illegitimate children often lose their situations and their honor. The consideration of cases of everyday occurrence is sufficient to grasp the difficulty of the question. What we require is more personal liberty for healthy, normal and adaptable individuals, and more restrictions for the abnormal, unhealthy and dangerous. The civil law of the future will have to take these facts into consideration, if it wishes to keep level with scientific progress, and prevent the instinct of the people having recourse to lynch law, or retaliation.
Meanwhile, attempts have been made to get out of the difficulty by prohibiting the marriage of insane persons or by declaring their marriage null when it has already been consummated; or again, by admitting insanity as a cause for divorce. Such measures are good as makeshifts in a period of transition. They assume that conceptions only occur in marriage, and that marriage necessarily means procreation. But these two suppositions are false, for it is only the pressure of custom and legislation which realizes them in part, especially in Catholic countries.
The civil code, in the present state of society, has at least the advantage of making possible the dissolution of monstrous unions, such as those of the absolutely insane or certain psychopaths of the worst kind. Unfortunately, divorce is as a rule only accorded in cases of well-marked mental disorders, while in reality the most atrocious unions are those which are contracted by crazy persons with only diminished responsibility, in whom the public and the law are unable to recognize or understand the existence of a definite mental anomaly. These people most often marry at a time when no one has yet recognized their true mental condition, or foreseen the consequences of their marriage. The unfortunate who finds herself (or himself) bound by such a union is then an object of endless martyrdom. The frequency of mental anomalies causes them to play an immense, and too often unrecognized role, in unhappy marriages.
At the request of the mother the tribunal of Bâle recently prohibited the marriage of a young man affected with a slight degree of mental weakness. This judgment was upheld by the Swiss tribunal for the following reasons: "Although capable of work, of earning his living, and of performing his military service, an individual may be an unsuitable subject for marriage. In the interests of family life and the future generation, it is the duty of the State to prevent the marriage of the feeble-minded, in order to avoid the perpetuation of a race of degenerates." I quote this from a journal. We can only congratulate tribunals which have the courage to consider the vital interests of the nation in their judgments.
Right of Succession.—Although right of succession has no direct bearing on the sexual question, it is indirectly connected with it through its influence on the procreation of children.
At the present day the poor have more children than the well-to-do. This is because they have nothing to lose, because coitus is one of their few pleasures, because they are ignorant of the means of preventing conception, and because they hope to profit by their children's labor. People who have some property are, on the contrary, afraid of falling into poverty through the procreation of too many children, and those who possess more are afraid of poverty for their offspring. The latter only desire a few heirs, so that after their death they can leave each a fortune suitable to their social position.
In France, especially, well-to-do people often limit their families to two. The parents have the unhappy idea that a certain fortune must be assured to their children to enable them to live in comfort. They do not understand that the necessity for a man to earn his living by work is the chief condition for a healthy existence.
Again, among very rich people there is often the fear that a large fortune may lose its power when divided, and thus diminish the influence of the family.
It is obvious that great poverty and great wealth constitute two extreme social evils. It is deplorable for a child to grow up with the idea that he will inherit a large fortune, enjoy life without working, and regard poor people more or less as subordinates. But it is still worse for a man to remain all his life an object for exploitation, in spite of the most repugnant and most arduous work, unless his superior faculties and good luck give him the chance of rising. It is also discouraging for a man to be unable by arduous work to obtain anything for himself or his wife and children, and only to work for society, and especially for the interests of capitalists.
Human instinct is not sufficiently social to allow of assiduous and hearty work solely in the interests of the community. The egoistic sentiments and family instincts of man are still much too strong.