Schmoller has calculated that under normal conditions about 50 per cent.—one-half, that is to say—of the population of the country must be either married or widowed. In Europe, however, a much smaller proportion is in this condition. Thus, taking only persons over fifty years of age, in Hungary 3 per cent., in Germany 9 per cent., in England 10 per cent., in Austria 13 per cent., in Switzerland 17 per cent., were unmarried.
The number of married and widowed persons among those over fifty years of age varies in the different countries between 56 per cent. (in Belgium) and 76 per cent. (in Hungary). In England, in the years 1886 to 1890, the number was 60 per cent., in Germany 61 per cent., in the United States 62 per cent., in France 64 per cent. If we enumerate the married only, excluding the widowed, we find 8 or 10 per cent. fewer. When we compare the number of married with the entire population, we find, instead of the above-mentioned 50 per cent., no more than 37 to 39 per cent. And this percentage appears likely to undergo a continual further decline. We must, at any rate, in the future reckon with this fact, although, of course, isolated oscillations in the marriage frequency may continue to occur. In these oscillations economic and domestic factors play a great part.
It is, however, quite erroneous to regard our own time as one especially characterized by “mercenary marriages,” one in which the union between man and wife has become a simple affair of commerce. There are not wanting reformers who attribute to mammonism all the blame for the disordered love-life of the present day, and who describe very vividly and dramatically Amor’s dance round the golden calf.
The facts of the history of civilization and folk-lore completely contradict the view that this mammonistic character of marriage is a product of our modern civilization. It is, on the contrary, a vestige of early primitive civilization, in which economic factors always had a far greater importance for marriage than spiritual sympathies. Thus, Heinrich Schurtz proves that among the majority of savage races marriage is rather an affair of business than of inclination. And where are money marriages more frequent than they are among our sturdy German peasants, with whom everything conventional has the freest possible play?[178]
It is first the higher, refined spiritual civilization which brings with it a higher conception of marriage as the realization of the ideal, individual only-love. As Ludwig Stein justly remarks:
“It was not in our own time that marriage first began to degenerate to the level of an economic idea. The converse, indeed, is true; the economic background of marriage, as it so clearly manifests itself among savage races, first began to disappear in the course of the development of our own system of civilization, and therewith began also the liberation of mankind from the burden of metallic shackles.”[179]
At the same time, it cannot be denied that even at the present day the economic factor plays a very extensive part in the determination of marriage, although certainly not to the degree maintained by Buckle, who held that there was a fixed and definite relationship between the number of marriages and the price of corn.[180] Beyond question, economic considerations have a great influence upon the frequency of marriage. Many marriages, even to-day, are purely mercenary marriages; but still at the present time the qualities of intellect and emotion, quite apart from physical characteristics, have at least an equal share in the production of marriage. Only among the classes who feel it their duty to keep up a particular kind of appearance, among the upper-middle classes, the aristocracy, and among officers in the army, is the economic question the main determining influence in marriage. Well known, also, is the predominance of mercenary marriages among the Jews.
One may be an enemy of mammonism, and still see the necessity for an economic regulation of conjugal relations in view of the expected offspring, of the altered conditions of life, of the increase in the household, and of the necessity for safeguarding personal independence and free development. Such economic considerations can harmonize perfectly with the demand for personal sympathy, and with the most intimate physical and spiritual harmony between husband and wife.
Schmoller rightly places the most important advance of the modern family in this, that it becomes more and more transformed from a productive and business institute into an institute of moral life in common; that by the limitation of its economic purposes the nobler ideal must become more predominant, and the family become a richer soil for the cultivation of sympathetic sentiments.[181]
More especially among the upper classes of modern European and American society is there apparent an increasing disinclination to marriage, or, to employ a phrase of the moral statistician Drobisch, there is a decline in the intensity of the marriage impulse. Although the often burning money question no doubt plays its part, that part is, on the whole, much smaller than the part played by the ever-increasing difficulties of individual spiritual harmony, difficulties dependent on differences in age, character, education, views of life, and individual development during marriage. This disinclination to marry is nourished by certain tendencies of the time to be subsequently described, and by certain changes in the relations between the sexes.