Question. What is your idea with regard to divorce?
Answer. My idea is this: As I said before, marriage is the most sacred contract—the most important contract—that human beings can make. As a rule, the woman dowers the husband with her youth—with all she has. From this contract the husband should never be released unless the wife has broken a condition; that is to say, has failed to fulfill the contract of marriage. On the other hand, the woman should be allowed a divorce for the asking. This should be granted in public, precisely as the marriage should be in public. Every marriage should be known. There should be witnesses, to the end that the character of the contract entered into should be understood; and as all marriage records should be kept, so the divorce should be open, public and known. The property should be divided by a court of equity, under certain regulations of law. If there are children, they should be provided for through the property and the parents. People should understand that men and women are not virtuous by law. They should comprehend the fact that law does not create virtue—that law is not the foundation, the fountain, of love. They should understand that love is in the human heart, and that real love is virtuous. People who love each other will be true to each other. The death of love is the commencement of vice. Besides this, there is a public opinion that has great weight. When that public opinion is right, it does a vast amount of good, and when wrong, a great amount of harm. People marry, or should marry, because it increases the happiness of each and all. But where the marriage turns out to have been a mistake, and where the result is misery, and not happiness, the quicker they are divorced the better, not only for themselves, but for the community at large. These arguments are generally answered by some donkey braying about free love, and by "free love" he means a condition of society in which there is no love. The persons who make this cry are, in all probability, incapable of the sentiment, of the feeling, known as love. They judge others by themselves, and they imagine that without law there would be no restraint.
What do they say of natural modesty? Do they forget that people have a choice? Do they not understand something of the human heart, and that true love has always been as pure as the morning star? Do they believe that by forcing people to remain together who despise each other they are adding to the purity of the marriage relation? Do they not know that all marriage is an outward act, testifying to that which has happened in the heart? Still, I always believe that words are wasted on such people. It is useless to talk to anybody about music who is unable to distinguish one tune from another. It is useless to argue with a man who regards his wife as his property, and it is hardly worth while to suggest anything to a gentleman who imagines that society is so constructed that it really requires, for the protection of itself, that the lives of good and noble women should be wrecked, I am a believer in the virtue of women, in the honesty of man. The average woman is virtuous; the average man is honest, and the history of the world shows it. If it were not so, society would be impossible. I don't mean by this that most men are perfect, but what I mean is this: That there is far more good than evil in the average human being, and that the natural tendency of most people is toward the good and toward the right. And I most passionately deny that the good of society demands that any good person should suffer. I do not regard government as a Juggernaut, the wheels of which must, of necessity, roll over and crush the virtuous, the self-denying and the good. My doctrine is the exact opposite of what is known as free love. I believe in the marriage of true minds and of true hearts. But I believe that thousands of people are married who do not love each other. That is the misfortune of our century. Other things are taken into consideration—position, wealth, title and the thousand things that have nothing to do with real affection. Where men and women truly love each other, that love, in my judgment, lasts as long as life. The greatest line that I know of in the poetry of the world is in the 116th sonnet of Shakespeare: "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds."
Question. Why do you make such a distinction between the rights of man and the rights of women?
Answer. The woman has, as her capital, her youth, her beauty. We will say that she is married at twenty or twenty-five. In a few years she has lost her beauty. During these years the man, so far as capacity to make money is concerned—to do something—has grown better and better. That is to say, his chances have improved; hers have diminished. She has dowered him with the Spring of her life, and as her life advances her chances decrease. Consequently, I would give her the advantage, and I would not compel her to remain with him against her will. It seems to me far worse to be a wife upon compulsion than to be a husband upon compulsion. Besides this, I have a feeling of infinite tenderness toward mothers. The woman that bears children certainly should not be compelled to live with a man whom she despises. The suffering is enough when the father of the child is to her the one man of all the world. Many people who have a mechanical apparatus in their breasts that assists in the circulation of what they call blood, regard these views as sentimental. But when you take sentiment out of the world nothing is left worth living for, and when you get sentiment out of the heart it is nothing more or less than a pump, an old piece of rubber that has acquired the habit of contracting and dilating. But I have this consolation: The people that do not agree with me are those that do not understand me.
—New York World, 1888.
SECULARISM.
Question. Colonel, what is your opinion of Secularism? Do you regard it as a religion?