In face of the iniquity of our bastardy laws we may well pause to doubt the traditional ideas of our sexual code and conventional morality. It seems to me that in these questions of sex we have receded further and further from the reality of things, and become blinded and baffled by the very idols to love that men have set up. One thing renders love altogether and incurably wrong, and that is waste. The terribly high death-rate among illegitimate children alone suffices to illustrate the actual conditions, to say nothing of the greater waste often carried on in those children who live. The question of the maintenance of such unfathered children is a scandal of our time. We may surely claim that the birth of any child, without exception, must be preceded by some form of contract which, though not necessarily binding the mother and the father to each other, will place on both alike the obligation of adequate fulfilment of the duties to their child. This, I believe, the State must enforce. If inability on the part of the parents to make such provision is proved, the State must step in with some wide and fitting scheme of insurance of childhood. The carrying out of even these simple demands will lead us a great step forward in practical morality. It will open up the way to a saner and more beautiful future.
But here, in case I am mistaken and thought to be desiring the loosening of the bonds between the sexes, I must repeat again how firmly I accept marriage as the best, the happiest, and the most practical form of the sexual association. The ideal union is, I am certain, an indestructible bond, trebly woven of inclination, duty, and convenience. Marriage is an institution older than any existing society, older than mankind, and reaches back, as Fabre's study of insects has so beautifully shown us, to an infinitely remote past. Its forms are, therefore, too fundamentally blended with human and, further back, with animal society for them to be shaken with theories, or even the practices of individuals or groups of individuals. Thus I accept marriage: I believe that its form must be regulated and cannot be left to the development of individual desires against the needs of the race.
There are some who, in seeking liberation from the ignominious conditions of our present amatory life, are wishing to rid marriage from all legal bonds, and are pointing to Free-love as the way of escape. To me this seems a very great mistake. I admit the splendid imaginative appeal in the idea of Love's freedom as it is put forward, for instance, by the great Swedish feminist, Ellen Key; I am unable to accept it as practical morality. This, I believe, should be the only sound basis for reform. The real question is not what people ought to do, but what they actually do and are likely to go on doing. It is these facts that the idealist fails to face. Love is a very mixed game indeed. And all that the wisest reformer has ever been able to do is to make bad guesses at the solution of its problems.
The fundamental principle of the new ideal morality is that love and marriage must always coincide, and, therefore, when love ceases the bond should be broken. This in theory is, of course, right. I doubt if it is, or ever will be, possible in practice. Experience has forced the knowledge that the most passionate love is often the most likely to end in disaster. Nor do I think that the evil is much lessened when no legal bond is entered into. Those few people who have made a success of Free-love would probably have made an equal success of marriage. I know personally several cases in which the same woman, and many in which the same man, has tried in succession legal marriage and free unions and has been equally unhappy in both.
All the facts seem to me to point in another direction for reform. I do not think that life's great central purpose of carrying on the race (not alone giving birth to fit children, but the equally necessary work of both parents uniting in caring for and bringing them up) can be left safely to be confused and wasted by its dependence on the gratification of personal desires. I wish that I thought otherwise. It would make it all so much easier. It is useless to point back here to the action of love's selection in the past history of life. As civilisation progresses, and as individual needs become elaborated and wealth increases, we tend to get further and further away from the realities of love. We choose our partners without understanding, and think very little of the needs of the future. What I want is to free marriage from those bonds that can be proved to act against practical morality. I do not wish at all to lessen its binding, only to defend it against the conventions of a false and narrow traditional morality. In love, as in every human relationship, it is character that avails and prevails—nothing else. Marriage is, or ought to be, the most practically moral institution that any civilisation is able to produce. Women and men are likely to get out of any form of the sexual association results in proportion to that which they put into it. A great many people put nothing into marriage, and they are disappointed when they get out of it—nothing. We shall put more into marriage, and not less, in proportion as we come to understand it and to value its enduring importance.
After all it is the people of any race who make marriage, not marriage the people. The form of union is but a symbol of the people's character, their desires, and capacities. If we have evolved the wrong women and men, then any reform of marriage is vain. Have we in our weakened civilisation drifted so far from life that the inherent attributes of loyalty and discipline to the future are no longer with us in sufficient measure adequately to respond to the enduring realities of love? The answer is with women. We must demand from the fathers of our children, as we demand from ourselves, loyalty to the well-being of the race; the discipline of our personal desires and loves that we may maintain ourselves fit as the bearers and protectors of those wider interests, which belong not to ourselves, not to this generation alone, but to the life and the future history of our race. Woman must again assert, as she did in the past, that she is the maker of men. She must reclaim her right, held by the female from the beginning of life, as the director of love's selective power. And more even than this. Woman with man must be the framer of the law, and the guide and director of all the relations of the sexes. But it is not sufficient to do this by mere proclamation. Virile nations are not made by theories or by the blast of the trumpet. They are reared in the bonds of marriage, and what we incorporate in that bond will be manifest in our children.
II.—Divorce
"The result of dissolving the formal stringency of the marriage relationship, it is sometimes said, would be a tendency to an immoral laxity. Those who make this statement overlook the fact that laxity tends to reach a maximum as the result of stringency, and that where the merely external authority of a rigid marriage law prevails then the extreme excesses of licence must flourish. It is also undoubtedly true, and for the same reason, that any sudden removal of restraints necessarily involves a reaction to the opposite extreme of licence. A slave is not changed in a stroke into an autonomous free man."—Havelock Ellis.
In putting forward a practical morality for marriage we have to remember that we are not really uprooting traditional morality. There is no necessity. Of its own decay the old morality has fallen in a confusion of ruin. The ideal marriage is the union of one woman with one man for life. This we have established. We have now to look at the question from another side and ask, How far is this ideal monogamy possible in practice? I think the answer must be that, as we stand at present, it is possible to very few. For marriage is essentially a state of bondage—there is no getting away from this—a state which calls upon the individual to surrender his personal freedom in the interests of the race and the stability of social structure. I have proved that this bondage acts really for the benefit and happiness of the individual, but this deep truth I must now leave. Marriage is, thus, a concession of the individual to the general welfare of the future and of the State. Now, with human nature as it is in its present development, it is clearly claiming the impossible to demand indissoluble marriage. Divorce is really implicit in the conditions of marriage itself, and the firmest believers in monogamy must be the supporters of practical and moral conditions of divorce.
The moral code of any society represents the experience of its members. But experience is continually changing and enlarging, and moral codes must also change and enlarge, or they become worn-out and useless. Those people who are unable to modify their moral code to fit new conditions and growth are doomed to extinction, while the people who adjust their customs and laws to meet new requirements open up the way to move on, and still onwards, in continual progress.