The termination of miserable “marriages of convenience” would ensure for many a new life, the production of healthier children under normal conditions; from the social point of view, it would increase the value of the man and the woman.
How many live together for long years who are strangers to each other in body and soul! How many slaves of marriage there are, whose union is unnatural, childless, and made hideous by mutual hatred!
Why should one see, in the name of a religious principle, these infernos—whose tortures are as varied as they are crushing—perpetuated? Why should not reason, individual rights, be allowed to correct ill-chance, false calculations, and disappointed hopes?
Why should a woman, who no longer finds in her husband the moral support she needs, submit to the horrors of a long agony without defence, of perpetual strife in which she is miserably vanquished; on the other hand, why should the man who does not find in his wife the companion—or even the slave—he desired, see the way to happiness closed to him for ever?
Marriage is based on a contract. Every contract can be rectified, modified, or broken. In a compact, there must be mutual agreement; from the moment when the agreement ceases to be respected by either of the parties, it is naturally dissolved.
Before the establishment of divorce the husband and wife who lived on bad terms had to endure suffering worse than death, for nothing, I repeat, is to be compared with the torment of being tied, body and soul, in hatred, contempt, or even merely in indifference.
In former days, the independent-minded, those who feared not public opinion, or thought little of social conventions, went each their way, to live in a different dwelling—as happens still in certain countries (in Spain, for instance, where divorce does not exist; where legal separation is not even recognised); but though they might live apart, the marriage contract held none the less, and the question of fortune remained a grave problem for solution. It is the same to-day when, through worldly expediency, or weakness, an ill-assorted couple share a miserable life or seek solace in separation. The woman, married under the Napoleonic Code, cannot dispose of her dowry, and the man, on his side, cannot sell without his wife’s signature. The société d’acquêts (common property of married people) is a constant menace in a situation of this kind; one comes to think that it is of no use for a couple to economise for the sake of their heirs, for, when one of the two parties dies, the common property goes to the other. Another case, also serious, may occur. If either husband or wife incurs debts, these, under the law, become common to both, and it comes about that the one who has not run into debt finds him or herself compelled to meet the liabilities of the other!
What manifold complications, what openings for dissension, what accumulated vexations! Widowhood, widowerhood, seems the only deliverance from a desperate situation.
But there is something worse still. In a household completely at variance, weary with strife, the children have to look on at scenes which wound their belief in the love between husband and wife. In such a case they suffer through the absence of divorce, both from the moral standpoint and because they are deprived of property which should fall to them, since through the société d’acquêts—that stern claimant—the children’s capital cannot be increased.
If we pass from this array of facts to another, which concerns this unnatural life of two people, the evil is no less great.