The conjugal novitiate is not a new scheme. It was practised prior to the Reformation in Scotland under the name of ‘hand-fasting.’ The parties met at the annual fairs, and by the ceremony of joining hands declared themselves man and wife for a year. On the anniversary of this function they were legally married by a priest—if all had gone well with them. If they had found the union a failure they parted.
[ PART IV]
CHILDREN—THE CUL-DE-SAC OF ALL
REFORMS
‘An early result, partly of her sex, partly of her passive strain is the founding, through the instrumentality of the first savage Mother, of a new and beautiful social state—Domesticity. . . . One day there appears in this roofless room that which is to teach the teachers of the world—a Little Child.’ —Henry Drummond.
‘Every good woman is by nature a mother, and finds best in maternity her social and moral salvation. She shall be saved in child-bearing.’ —Grant Allen.
‘Children are a man’s power and his honour.’ —Hobbes.
[I]
TO BEGET OR NOT TO BEGET—THE QUESTION
OF THE DAY
‘Marriage is therefore rooted in family rather than family in marriage.’ —Westermarck.
If we could leave children out of the question, the readjustment of the conjugal conditions would be simple enough. But Amoret has truly called this problem ‘the cul-de-sac of all reforms.’ Any system, whatever its form, whether leasehold marriage, free love, polygamy, polyandry, or duogamy—any scheme that tends to confuse the fatherhood of the child, or deprive the child of the solid advantages of a permanent home—is hopeless from the start. This, however, obviously applies only to the couples who have children. Formerly those who married expected to have a family, and were disappointed if this hope were not fulfilled. That it was possible to limit the number of their offspring, or even to avoid parenthood entirely, was of course unknown to them. Nowadays all this is changed, and the doctrines of Malthus obtain everywhere.
Bernard Shaw says: ‘The artificial sterilisation of matrimony is the most revolutionary discovery of the nineteenth century.’ It certainly makes possible the revolutionary suggestions about marriage, or rather would make them more feasible if the ‘discovery’ were universally put into practice.
Let us take it then, that where children are desired no relaxation of our present marriage system is advisable, and that people who wish to experiment in new matrimonial schemes must resolutely avoid the ‘cul-de-sac of all reforms,’ and remain childless.