As regards affection, present conditions should apparently be favorable to the strength of the bond. Since personal choice is so little interfered with, and the whole matter conducted with a view to congeniality, it would seem that a high degree of congeniality must, on the whole, be secured. And, indeed, this is without much doubt the case: nowhere probably, is there so large a proportion of couples living together in love and confidence as in those countries where marriage is most free. Even if serious friction arises, the fact that each has chosen the other without constraint favors a sense of responsibility for the relation, and a determination to make it succeed that might be lacking in an arranged marriage. We know that if we do not marry happily it is our own fault, and the more character and self-respect we have the more we try to make the best of our venture. There can hardly be a general feeling that marriage is one thing and love another, such as may prevail under the rule of convenance.
Yet it is not inconsistent to say that this aim at love increases divorce. The theory being that the contracting parties are to be made happy, then, if they are not, it seems to follow that the relation is a failure and should cease: the brighter the ideal the darker the fact by contrast. Where interest and custom rule marriage those who enter into it may not expect congeniality, or, if they do, they feel that it is secondary and do not dream of divorce because it is not achieved. The woman marries because her parents tell her to, because marriage is her career, and because she desires a wedding and to be mistress of a household; the man because he wants a household and children and is not indifferent to the dowry. These tangible aims, of which one can be fairly secure beforehand, give stability where love proves wanting.
And while freedom in well-ordered minds tends toward responsibility and the endeavor to make the best of a chosen course, in the ill-ordered it is likely to become an impulsiveness which is displayed equally in contracting and in breaking off marriage without good cause. The conditions of our time give an easy rein to undisciplined wills, and one index of their activity is the divorce rate. Bad training in childhood is a large factor in this, neglected or spoiled children making bad husbands or wives, and probably furnishing the greater number of the divorced. Common observation seems to show that the latter are seldom people of thoroughly wholesome antecedents.
It may not be amiss to add that personal affection is at the best an inadequate foundation for marriage. To expect that one person should make another happy or good is requiring too much of human nature. Both parties ought to be subject to some higher idea, in reverence for which they may rise above their own imperfection: there ought to be something in the way of religion in the case. A remark which Goethe made of poetry might well be applied to personal love: “It is a very good companion of life, but in no way competent to guide it”;[160] and because people have no higher thought to shelter them in disappointment is frequently the reason that marriage proves a failure.
As regards institutional bonds there is of course a great relaxation.
Thus economic interdependence declines with the advance of specialization. The home industries are mostly gone, and every year more things are bought that used to be made in the house. Little is left but cooking, and that, either as a task of the wife or in the shape of the Domestic Service Question, is so troublesome that many are eager to see it follow the rest. At one time marriage was, for women, about the only way to a respectable maintenance, while to men a good housewife was equally an economic necessity. Now this is true only of the farming population, and less true of them than it used to be: in the towns the economic considerations are mostly opposed to married life.
Besides making husband and wife less necessary to each other, these changes tend to make married women restless. Nothing works more for sanity and contentment than a reasonable amount of necessary and absorbing labor; disciplining the mind and giving one a sense of being of use in the world. It seems a paradox to say that idleness is exhausting, but there is much truth in it, especially in the case of sensitive and eager spirits. A regular and necessary task rests the will by giving it assurance, while the absence of such a task wearies it by uncertainty and futile choice. Just as a person who follows a trail through the woods will go further with less exertion than one who is finding his way, so we all need a foundation of routine, and the lack of this among women of the richer classes is a chief cause of the restless, exacting, often hysterical, spirit, harassing to its owner and every one else, which tends toward discontent, indiscretion and divorce.
The old traditional subordination on the part of the wife had its uses, like other decaying structures of the past; and however distasteful to modern ideas of freedom, was a factor in holding the family together. For, after all, no social organization can be expected to subsist without some regular system of government. We say that the modern family is a democracy; and this sounds very well; but anarchy is sometimes a more correct description. A well-ordered democracy has a constitution and laws, prescribing the rights and duties of the various members of the state, and providing a method of determining controversies: the family, except as we recognize within reasonable limits the authority of the husband and father, has nothing of the sort. So long as the members are one in mind and feeling there is an unconscious harmony which has nothing to do with authority; but with even slight divergence comes the need of definite control. What would happen on shipboard if the captain had to govern by mere personal ascendency, without the backing of maritime law and custom? Evidently there would be mutinies, as among pirate crews, which only an uncommonly strong man could quell; and the family is often in a similar condition.[161]
The relaxation of moral sentiment regarding marriage by migrations and other sorts of displacement is easily traced in statistics, which show that divorce is more frequent in new countries, in cities—peopled by migration—and in the industrial and commercial classes most affected by economic change. To have an effective public opinion holding people to their duty it is important that men should live long in one place and in one group, inheriting traditional ideas and enforcing them upon one another. All breaking up of old associations involves an “individualism” which is nowhere more active than in family relations.
The same principles go to explain diminished control by the law and the church. Thus we notice that the states of the American Union, having made their marriage laws in comparative independence of the English tradition and in harmony with a relaxing public sentiment, have much divorce; while in Canada the restraining hand of that tradition has kept the law conservative and made divorce difficult and rare. The surprising contrast in this regard between the two sides of the Detroit or St. Lawrence rivers is only partly explained by the different social traits of the people.