—with not a word about the two persons immediately concerned. Nor is this strange, for marriage is not generally conceived of among either primitive or highly civilized peoples as a personal relationship. It is an economic arrangement, an alliance between families, a means for getting children. To allow so unruly a passion as love to figure in the selection of a mate, is an irregularity which may under certain circumstances be tolerated, but one which is nevertheless likely to be regarded with extreme disapproval. As individualism makes progress against group-tyranny, the preliminaries and the actual contracting of marriage become less the affair of God, the State, the family and the community, and more the affair of the two people chiefly interested; but once contracted, the marriage can hardly be said, even in the most civilized community, to be free of considerable regulation by these four influences. The time which Spencer foresaw, when “the union by affection will be held of primary moment and the union by law as of secondary moment,” has by no means arrived. If the married couple be Roman Catholics, for example, they may not free themselves from an unhappy marriage without paying the penalty of excommunication; and if they live in a State dominated by the Catholic Church, they may be legally estopped from freeing themselves at all. Nor may they, save by continence, limit the number of their offspring without risking the same penalty. If they are Episcopalians or Lutherans they may divorce only on the ground of adultery, and the guilty party is forbidden to remarry. In communities where the influence of other Protestant sects predominates, and where, therefore, divorce and remarriage are not formally forbidden by the Church, the pressure of public opinion may yet operate to prevent them. The State not only prescribes the form that marriage shall take, but it may also either prohibit divorce—as in South Carolina, for example—or forbid it save in accordance with such regulations as it sees fit to make; and these regulations are not only of a kind that make divorce prohibitive to the poor, but they are often so humiliating as to constitute an effective barrier to the dissolution of unhappy unions. The State of New York offers an excellent illustration. Adultery is the only ground upon which divorce is allowed, and even then it may be refused if the action is taken by mutual consent. The couple who wish to be divorced must therefore, if there be no legal cause, go through the demoralizing business of making a case, which means that one or the other must provide at least the appearance of “misconduct”; and even then they are in danger of being found in collusion. But suppose one party to be giving legal ground; then the other party, in order to get proof, is obliged to resort to the lowest kind of espionage. Such disreputable methods, however much they be in keeping with the nature and practices of the State, are hardly becoming to civilized society, and civilized persons are indisposed towards them. Their general effect is therefore to discourage application for divorce in New York and encourage it elsewhere.
It is significant of the unspiritual estimate generally put upon marriage, that incompatibility is rarely allowed as a legal ground of divorce. Violation of the sexual monopoly that marriage implies; pre-nuptial unchastity on the part of the woman; impotence; cruelty; desertion; failure of support; insanity; all of these or some of them are the grounds generally recognized where divorce is allowed at all. This is to say that society demands a specific grievance of one party against the other, a grievance having physical or economic consequences, as a prerequisite to freedom from the marriage-bond. The fact that marriage may be a failure spiritually is seldom taken into account. Yet there is no difficulty about which less can be done. Infidelity may be forgiven and in time forgotten; the deserter may return; the delinquent may be persuaded to support his family; the insane person may recover; even impotence may be cured. But if two people are out of spiritual correspondence, if they are not at ease in one another’s society, there is nothing to be done about it. “Anything,” says Turgenev, “may be smoothed over, memories of even the most tragic domestic incidents gradually lose their strength and bitterness; but if once a sense of being ill at ease installs itself between two closely united persons, it can never be dislodged.” Modern society is slowly, very slowly, coming into the wisdom which prompted this observation. The gradual liberalization of the divorce-laws which our moralists regard as a symptom of modern disrespect for the sacredness of marriage, is in fact a symptom of a directly opposite tendency—the tendency to place marriage on a higher spiritual plane than it has hitherto occupied.
The State assumes the right either to allow artificial limitation of offspring or to make it a crime; and it exercises this assumption according to its need for citizens[12] or the complexion of its religious establishment. It also fixes the relative status and rights of the two parties. In several American States, for instance, a married woman is incompetent to make contracts or to fix her legal residence. The Virginia law recognizes the primary right of the father to the custody of the child, yet it makes the mother criminally liable for the support of children. On the other hand, the husband is everywhere required by law to support his wife. Such laws, of course, like most laws, are felt only when the individual comes into conflict with them. The State does not interfere in many cases where married couples subvert its regulations—for example, the law which entitles the husband to his wife’s services in the home and permits him to control her right to work outside the home, does not become binding save in cases where the husband sees fit to invoke it. As a rule the State forbids fornication and adultery.[13] In case of separation and divorce, if the parties disagree concerning financial arrangements or the custody of children, it exercises the right to arbitrate these matters.
The sanctions of interference by the family, save in the contracting of marriage by minors, are at present those of custom, affection, and (in so far as it exists and may be made effective) economic power. When two persons have decided to marry, for instance, it remains quite generally customary for the man to go through the formality of asking the woman’s nearest male relation for her hand. This is of course a survival from the period when a woman’s male guardian had actual power to prevent her marrying without his consent. The influence of affection is too obvious to require illustration; it is the subtlest and most powerful sanction of family interference. Economic power is perhaps most commonly used to prevent or compel the contracting of marriage. It may make itself felt, where parents or other relatives are well-to-do, in threats of disinheritance if prospective heirs undertake to make marriages which are displeasing to them. A striking instance of the use of this power is the will of the late Jay Gould, which required each of his children to obtain consent of the others before marrying. It is not uncommon for legators to stipulate that legatees shall or shall not marry before a certain age under penalty of losing their inheritance.
These influences do not always, of course, take the same direction. At present, for example, artificial limitation of offspring receives irregular but effective community-sanction in face of opposition by Church and State. Or again, public opinion almost universally condemns the idea that a father may, by his will, remove his children from the custody of their mother, although the State, as in Maryland and Delaware, may sanction such an act. But, however much they may check one another, these influences are all constantly operating to restrict and regulate marriage away from its original intention as a purely personal relationship, and to keep it in the groove of economic and social institutionalism. The reasons for this are to be found in the vestigiary fear of sex, love of power, love of the habitual, religious superstition, and above all in the notion that the major interests of the group are essentially opposed to those of the individual and are more important than his. A combination of two of these motives has recently come under my own observation in the case of a young woman whose parents can not forgive her for having divorced a man whom she did not love and married a man whom she did. They were accustomed to their first son-in-law, and resent the necessity of adjusting themselves to the idea of having a new one. Moreover, they feel that their daughter should have spared them the “disgrace” of a divorce. The fact that she was unhappy in her first marriage and is happy in her second seems to have little weight with them. They did their best to prevent her second marriage and are at present exerting every effort to make it unsuccessful. It is needless to emphasize the fact that this order of interference can not be expected to disappear while the notion persists that the actions of one adult member of a family or group can possibly reflect credit or discredit upon all the other members.
II
If one be an apologist for the present economic and social order, there is little fault to be found with this endless and manifold regulation of the most intimate concern of the individual, save that it is not as effective as it once was. Society, we are being constantly reminded, is founded in the family. No one, I think, will quarrel with this statement, particularly at this stage of the world’s rule by the exploiting State. Marriage is, to quote Dr. E. C. Parsons, “an incomparable protection of society—as society has been constituted”; and this for a reason which Dr. Parsons did not mention. Nor has the reason been stated by anyone else, so far as I am aware, although the fact is emphasized often enough. It is emphasized, however, largely in the spirit of a contemporary French writer who declares that “an institution upon which society[14] is based should not be represented to society as an instrument of torture, a barbarous apparatus. We know, on the contrary that this institution is good, and that it would be impossible to conceive of a better one upon which to base our customs.” Well, but suppose it is an instrument of torture, or at least that we have come to find it highly unsatisfactory; must we, in spite of the fact, resolve to think it good because society is based upon it? Ought we not, rather, to examine the order of society that institutionalized marriage helps to perpetuate, in order to determine whether it is worth preserving at the cost of preserving also an institution which has become “an instrument of torture”?
The reason why marriage is “an incomparable protection to society” lies in the fact that the continuance of the power of the exploiting State depends upon the relative helplessness of its exploited subjects; and nothing renders the subject more helpless against the dominance of the State than marriage. For monopoly, under the protection of the State, has rendered the support of a family extremely difficult, by closing free access of labour to natural resources and thus enabling the constant maintenance of a labour-surplus. Where there is little or no land not legally occupied, access to the soil is impossible save on terms that render it, if not downright prohibitive, at least unprofitable. The breadwinner who has neither land nor capital is thus forced to take his chance in a labour-market overcrowded by applicants for work who are in exactly his position: they are shut out from opportunity to work for themselves, and obliged to accept such employment as they can get at a wage determined not by their capacity to produce, but by the number of their competitors. Not only is the wage-earner thus obliged to content himself with a small share of what his labour produces; he is forced to pay out of that share further tribute to monopoly in most of the things he buys. For shelter, for the products of the soil and mines, he pays tribute to the monopolist of land and natural resources; for industrial products, in most countries, he pays to the monopoly created by high tariffs. Or he may have to pay to both, as in the case of the purchaser of steel products.
Such disadvantages tend not only to keep wages near the subsistence-level, but to keep opinions orthodox—or if not orthodox, unexpressed. For the wage-earner gets his living on sufferance: while he continues to please his employer he may earn a living, however inadequate, for himself and family; but if he show signs of discontent with the established order, by which his employer benefits or thinks he benefits, he is likely to find himself supplanted by some other worker whose need makes him more willing to conform, in appearance at least. There are even conditions under which his mere unorthodoxy may bring him to jail, in thirty-four States of this enlightened Republic. There are exceptional cases, of course, where his skill or special training makes him a virtual monopolist in his line and thus renders him indispensable, like a certain well-known professor who continues to hold his position in spite of his avowed economic unorthodoxy simply because there is no one else who can fill it. But it may be perceived at once that the average wage-earner with a family to support will be under much greater pressure to dissemble than will the worker who has no family; for where the single worker risks privation for himself alone, the married worker takes this risk for his family as well. Nor does economic pressure operate only towards the appearance of conformity; it operates towards actual conformity, for the person who has children to rear and educate will be strongly impelled towards conservatism by his situation. If he can get along at all under the present order, the mere vis inertiae will incline him to fear for the sake of his family the economic dislocation attendant upon any revolutionary change, and to choose rather to keep the ills he has.[15] Moreover, the unnatural situation popularly called the “labour-problem,” brought about through exclusion from the land, tends to create the psychology of the wage-slave: it tends to make people regard the opportunity to earn one’s living not as a natural right, but as something that one receives as a boon from one’s employer, and hence to accept the idea that an employer may be justified in dictating to his employees in matters of conduct and opinion.
Thus the economic conditions brought about by the State operate to make marriage the State’s strongest bulwark; and those who believe that the preservation of the State, or of a particular form of it, is a sacred duty—their number among its victims is legion—are quite logical in taking alarm at the increasing unwillingness of men and women to marry, or if they do marry, to have children. They are logical not only because marriage and children make for endurance of established abuses, but because, as I have already remarked, it is important for the State to have as many subjects as possible, to keep up a labour-surplus at home and to fight for the interests of its privileged class abroad; that is, so long as industry is able to meet the exactions of monopoly and still pay interest and wages. Where monopoly has reduced interest and wages to the vanishing-point, the State can no longer be said to be a going concern; its breakdown is then only a matter of time. This point has been reached in England, and hence the condition of which I have spoken: a numerous population is no longer desirable, for as unemployed they are a burden on the State and a menace to its existence. But as long as the State is a going concern, the Spartan rule is that best suited to its interests: obligatory marriage, and unlimited reproduction.