"'If marriages were to last only ten years, then be sure that the said critical period with its inevitable scandals would set in at the end of the fifth year. The cause, the real cause of these scandals is not in the length of time, but in the very nature of marriage. If this iniquitous and barbarous contract were to last only for five years, then its critical period and its scandals would appear at the end of two years. And by a parity of reasoning, if marriage were to last one year only, it would by its inherent vice come to grief at the end of six months.
"'The only cure for marriage is to abolish it. Does marriage not demand the very quality that not one English person in a hundred thousand possesses: yieldingness? Or can anyone deny that no English person has ever really meant to admit that he or she was wrong?
"'They are all of them infallible. People write such a lot about the hatred of Popery in English history. What nonsense. English people do not hate Popery; they despise the idea that there should be only one infallible Pope, whereas they know that in England alone there are at present over thirty millions of such infallibles. This being so, how can marriage be a success?
"'Or take it,' the Free Love lady continued, 'from another standpoint. Most Englishmen enter married life with little if any experience of womanhood. Only the other day a young man of twenty-five, who was just about to marry, asked in my presence whether it was likely that a woman gave birth to one child early in the month of May, and to the other in the following month of June? He thought that The Times instalment system applied to all good things.
"'Other young men inquire seriously about the strategy of marriage, and the famous song in the Belle of New York, in which the girl asks her fiancé "When we are married what will you do?" was possible only in countries of Anglo-Saxon stock. In Latin countries the operette could not have been finished in one evening on account of the interminable laughter of the public. In London nobody turned a hair, as they say. Half of the men present had, in their time, asked the same question of themselves or of their doctors.
"'Now if there is one thing more certain than another in the whole matter of marriage it is this, that the inexperienced fiancé generally makes the worst husband. Being familiar only with the ways and manners of men, he misunderstands, misconstrues, and misjudges most of the actions or words of his young wife. He is positively shocked at her impetuous tenderness, and takes many a manifestation of her love for him as mere base flattery or as hypocrisy. Not infrequently he ceases treating her as his wife, and goes on living with her as his sister; and, since the wife, more loyal to nature, rarely omits recouping herself, her husband acts the part of certain gentlemen of Constantinople. It is thus that the famous ménage à trois does not, properly speaking, exist in England. In England it is always a ménage à deux.
"'If, then, instead of continuing marriage; if, instead of maintaining an institution so absurd and so contrary to the nature of an Englishman, we dropped it altogether; if, instead of compulsory wedding ceremonies, we introduced that most sacred of all things: Free Love; the advantages accruing to the nation as a whole, and to each person constituting that nation, would be immense.
"'Free Love, ay: that is the only solution. Nature knows what she is after. The blue-eyed crave the black-eyed ones; the fair-haired desire the dark-haired; the tall ones the small; the thin ones the thick; the unlettered ones the lettered unfettered ones. This is Nature.
"'If these affinities are given free scope, the result will be a nation of giants and heroes. Affinities produce Infinities. Free Trade in wedlock is the great panacea. Since the only justifiable ground for marriage is—the child, how dare one marry anyone else than the person with whom he or she is most likely to have the finest babe? That person is clearly indicated by Nature. How, then, can Society, Law, or the Church claim the right to interfere in the choice?
"'I know that many of you will say: "Oh, if men should take their wives only from Free Love, they would take a different one every quarter." But if you come to think of it, it is not so at all. If men took their wives out of Free Love, they could not so much as think of taking another wife every quarter. For, which other wife could they take? There would be none left for them, since all the other women would, by the hypothesis, long have been taken up by their Free Lovers. Moreover, if a man takes a wife out of Free Love, he sticks to her just because he loves her. Had he not loved her, he would not have taken her; and if he should cease loving her, he would find no other woman to join him, owing to his proved fickleness.