Monogamic marriage will continue to subsist; it is the last-comer, and much the most worthy, and besides, the balance of the sexes makes it almost a necessity; but it will have more and more equality in it, and less and less of legal restraint. On this point I am glad to find myself in accord with the most celebrated of modern sociologists, Herbert Spencer, who is not very bold, however, on these delicate points. “In primitive phases,” he says, “while permanent monogamy was developing, union in the name of the law—that is, originally, the act of purchase—was accounted the essential part of the marriage, and union in the name of affection was not essential. In the present day union in the name of the law is considered the most important, and union by affection as less important. A time will come when union by affection will be considered the most important, and union in the name of the law the least important, and men will hold in reprobation those conjugal unions in which union by affection is dissolved.”[1126] Montaigne once wrote: “We have thought to make our marriage tie stronger by taking away all means of dissolving it; but the more we have tightened the constraint, so much the more have we relaxed and detracted from the bond of will and affection.”[1127]
It is therefore probable that a future more or less distant will inaugurate the régime of monogamic unions, freely contracted, and, at need, freely dissolved by simple mutual consent, as is already the case with divorces in various European countries—at Geneva, in Belgium, in Roumania, etc., and with separation in Italy. In these divorces of the future, the community will only intervene in order to safeguard that which is of vital interest to it—the fate and the education of the children. But this evolution in the manner of understanding and practising marriage will operate slowly, for it supposes an entire corresponding revolution in public opinion; moreover, it requires as a corollary, profound modifications in the social organism. The régime of liberty in marriage and the disintegration of our actual familial type are only possible on condition that the State or the district, in a great number of cases, is ready to assume the rôle of guardian and educator of children; but, before it can take on itself these important functions, it must have considerable resources at its disposal which to-day are wanting. In our present régime, the family, however defective it may be, still constitutes the safest, and almost the only shelter for the child, and we cannot think of destroying this shelter before we have constructed a larger and better one.
Transformations so radical as these cannot evidently be wrought instantaneously, by a mere change of view, after the fashion of political revolutions. Nothing is more chimerical than to fear or to hope for the sudden destruction of our actual forms of marriage, of the family, and of property; but there is no doubt that all this is tottering. The alarm and the lamentations of so many moralists, both lay and religious, are not therefore without some foundation. Societies have always evolved, but the rapidity of this evolution is accelerating; it is, in some sort, proportionate to the square of the time elapsed. I fear that in the eyes of our descendants we shall appear slaves of routine, as our ancestors are in ours.
For those who have not firmly rallied to the side of the great law of progress, the future is full of terror. It has always been thus; the apostles of progress have always had to overcome the resistance of the sectaries of the past. From time immemorial, certain Dyak tribes were accustomed to fell trees by chopping at the trunk with a hatchet, perpendicularly to the fibres. One day some revolutionaries proposed making V-shaped cuttings, in the European method. The Dyak conservative party, inspired by the regard due to custom, were wroth at this, and punished the innovators by a fine.[1128] Nevertheless, I do not doubt that the new method has triumphed in practice; it was found advantageous. But this incident is, in miniature, the history of all transformations, small or great.
It is very certain that in societies where marriage by groups half polyandric and half polygamic had been instituted for centuries, the bold agitators who attempted to substitute individual union were considered at first as dangerous revolutionaries, and those who dismembered into families the communal clan only succeeded at the cost of great difficulty and peril. Thus in the Oresteia of Æschylus, of which I have spoken in the last chapter, the chorus of the Eumenides gives voice to the protestations of public opinion against the establishment of the paternal family in Greece. The prospects which alarm the conservative spirits of to-day are, in truth, but the last consequence of that ancient evolution. Statisticians who are not evolutionists prove, without understanding it, that the indissolubility of marriage becomes more and more intolerable for individuals.[1129]There is, as it were, a tide of discord continually rising which renders conjugal stability more and more precarious. This grievous state of things distresses, on the other hand, the moralists, for neither do they see the reason of it. The surprise of the former is not more justified than the lamentation of the latter. It is nothing more than the future, which, with its habitual effrontery, persists in rising out of the past. The faint-hearted cry to us that everything is coming to an end. It is not so; on the contrary, everything is about to be renewed. From the most distant stone age, the history of humanity has only been a long series of regenerations. Far from mourning when the world seems to be entering a period of fresh life, let us rather rejoice and say again with Lucretius—
“Cedit enim rerum novitate extrusa vetustas
Semper et ex aliis aliud reparare necesse est.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1108] Montaigne, Essays; Custom.
[1109] A. Giraud-Teulon, Orig. du Mariage, etc., p. 428.—L. Morgan, Ancient Societies, p. 389.
[1110] Sociology, vol. ii. p. 304.