The pistol and dagger, too, figure in the chronicles of matrimony, but as phenomena. In the home-theater, on the contrary, the punishment of retaliation, the little basenesses, the stirring of conscience, under all forms and at all sorts of prices, are in common use. The ménages à trois (aye, even four) are pretty pictures in kind; and the hypocrisy of husbands who will not see, because they detest scenes, figure every day in the running account of modern matrimony.
Live and let live—to apply the noble modern institution of co-operative societies to the family; and raise aloft the banner of the association of forces. One for all, and all for one!
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Infidelity and treachery are not the only moths which corrode marriage. We have all the domestic discords which spring from the inequality of the needs of intelligence, heart, and habits of thought; we have the partisans of the wife and those of the husband, who quarrel amongst themselves, complicating the problem, poisoning the wounds, opening with every touch the cicatrices which time and love were so pitifully healing.
If war is an exception in matrimony, peace is still more rare; and one may safely say that in the greater number of cases it is an armed peace, an atmosphere which relaxes the strength, dries up the purest sources of tenderness, and destroys its happiness. In a word, as our society is constituted in the present day, hell is not common in the family circle, paradise exceedingly rare, but purgatory is almost universal.
And yet marriage is still the least evil amongst the unions of the man and woman; it can and ought to grow continually better and increase human happiness; which is for me the highest and truest end of progress.
What is the use of being able to run through space at the velocity of seventy kilometres an hour, or to go round the world in seventy days; what the use of being able to talk through the telephone or see the clouds in the sky of Mars; what the use of so great a fecundity of books, of such a deluge of journals, if one is unable to increase the patrimony of human happiness by even a farthing?
At the present day marriage may be happy, just as one may become rich by playing in the lottery, but whilst one door opens to the possibility of good, two open to that of evil. He who utters the fatal yes before the Syndic girded with the three national colors, lets a grain fall in the scale that holds our happiness and two in the scale that holds our misfortunes. It is his duty to do the opposite; it is the duty of society to defend matrimony from the perils which threaten it, by wise laws not inspired by the arcadian tendency of the heart, nor by theocratical mysticism, but by a profound knowledge of man.
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