What will marriage and the family become in the future? For one who is not a prophet by supernatural inspiration, it is hazardous to make predictions. The future, nevertheless, is born from the womb of the past, and, after having patiently scrutinised the evolution of bygone ages, we may legitimately risk a few inductions with regard to the ages to come. Doubtless the primitive forms of marriage and the family will persist, if not for ever, as Herbert Spencer believes, at least for a very long time among certain inferior races, protected and at the same time oppressed by climates which the civilised man cannot brave with impunity. These backward prehistoric races will continue to subsist in unwholesome regions, as witnesses of a distant past, recalling to more developed races their humble origin. But with these last the form of marriage and of the family, which has incessantly been evolving, cannot evidently remain immutable in the future. The little human world knows no more repose than the cosmic environment from whence it has sprung, and which encloses it. Among peoples, as among individuals, vital concurrence and selection do their work. Now, when it is a matter of institutions so essentially vital as marriage and the family, the least amelioration is of the highest importance; it has an influence on the number and quality of fresh generations, and on the flesh and spirit of peoples. All things being equal, the preponderance, whether pacific or not, will always fall to the nations which produce the greatest number of the most robust, most intelligent, and best citizens. These better endowed nations will often absorb or replace the others, and always in the long run will be docilely imitated by them. Ethnography and history show us the true sense of evolution in the past. Societies have constantly advanced from confusion to distinction. Monogamic marriage has succeeded to various more confused modes of sexual association. So also the family is the ultimate residuum of vast communities of ill-defined relationships. In its turn, the family itself has become restricted. At first it was still a sort of little clan; and then it was reduced to be essentially no more than the very modest group formed by the father, the mother, and the children. At the same time the familial patrimony crumbled, just as that of the clan had been previously parcelled out; it became individual. What is reserved for us in the future? Will the family be reconstituted by a slow movement of retrogression, as Herbert Spencer believes?[1123] Nothing is less probable.
Institutions have this in common with rivers, that they do not easily flow back towards their source. If they sometimes seem to retrograde, it is generally a mere appearance, resulting from a sort of sociologic rhythm. In truth, the end and the beginning may assume a superficial analogy, masking a profound difference. Thus the unconscious atheism of the Kaffirs has nothing in common with that of Lucretius, and nothing can be less analogous than the anarchic equality of the Fuegians and American individualism. If, as is probable, the individualist evolution, already so long begun, continues in the future, the civilised family—that is to say, the last collective unit of societies—must again be disintegrated, and finally subsist no longer except in genealogy scientifically registered with ever-increasing care; for it is, and always will be, important to be able to prejudge how “the voice of the ancestors” may speak in the individual. But even from the crumbling of the family will result the reconstitution of a larger collective unit, having common interests and resuscitating under another form that solidarity without which no society can endure.
But this new collectivity will in no way be copied from the primitive clan. Whether it be called State, district, canton, or commune, its government will be at once despotic and liberal; it will repress everything that would be calculated to injure the community, but in everything else it will endeavour to leave the most complete independence to individuals. Our actual family circle is most often very imperfect; so few families can give, or know how to give, a healthy, physical, moral, and intellectual education to the child, that in this domain large encroachments of the State, whether small or great, are probable, even desirable. There is, in fact, a great social interest before which the pretended rights of families must be effaced. In order to prosper and live, it is necessary that the ethnic or social unit should incessantly produce a sufficient number of individuals well endowed in body, heart, and mind. Before this primordial need all prejudices must yield, all egoistic interests must bend.
But the family and marriage are closely connected; the former cannot be modified so long as the latter remains unchanged. If the legal ties of the family are stretched, while social ties are drawn closer, marriage will have the same fortune. For a long time, more or less silently, a slow work of disintegration has begun, and we see it accentuated every day. Leaving aside morals, which are difficult to appreciate, let us simply take the numerical results which statistics furnish us with in regard to divorce and illegitimate births.
In the five countries compared as follows, the increase of divorces has been continuous and progressive during thirty years, and in France the number has doubled.
The number of illegitimate births followed simultaneously an analogous progression. In France, during the period 1800-1805, it was 4.75 per 100; now, wrote M. Block in 1869, it has gradually risen to 7.25 per 100.[1124] At the same time, and as a consequence of this demographic movement, the proportion of free unions has considerably increased.
Increase of Divorces.[1125]
The frequency of divorces in 1851-55 being 100, what has it become during the following years?
|
France. Separations. |
Saxony. Divorces. | Belgium. Divorces. | Holland. Divorces. | Sweden. Divorces. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1851-55 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| 1856-60 | 128 | 83 | 140 | 100 | 98 |
| 1861-65 | 150 | 75 | 160 | 112 | 109 |
| 1866-70 | 190 | 72 | 190 | 115 | 113 |
| 1871-75 | 163 | 80 | 280 | 139 | 132 |
| 1876-80 | 225 | 105 | 420 | 151 | 161 |
A. Bertillon calculated this proportion for Paris at about a tenth. But these results are simply the logical continuation of the evolution of marriage. It is in the sense of an ever-increasing individual liberty, especially for woman, that this evolution is being effected. Between men and women the conjugal relations have at first been nearly everywhere from masters to slaves; then marital despotism became slowly attenuated, and at Rome, for example, where the gradual metamorphosis may be traced during a long historic period, the power of the paterfamilias, which at first had no limit, at length became curbed; the personality of the woman was more and more accentuated, and the rigid marriage of the first centuries of the Republic was replaced under the Empire by a sort of free union. Doubtless this movement necessarily retrograded under the influence of Christianity; but, as always happens in the logic of things, it has, nevertheless, resumed its course; it will become more and more evident, and will surely pass the point at which it stopped in imperial Rome.