And a hope that all mankind shall see,
Untrammeled by Creed, Law or Custom—
The attainable goal of the Free.
MARRIAGE AND THE HOME.
By John R. Coryell.
YOU remember Punch's advice to the young man about to be married—don't. There is a jest nearly half a century old, and yet ever fresh and poignant. Why? Can it be that the secret, serious voice of mankind proclaims the jest truth in masquerade? Can it be that marriage, as an institution, has indeed proved itself in experience such a terrible failure?
We worship many fetishes, we of the superior civilization, and the institution of marriage is the chief of them. Few of us but bow before that; before that and the home of which it is the foundation. And I know what scorn and obloquy and denunciation await that man who stands unawed before it, seeing in it but an ugly little idol. And I guess what will be dealt out to him who not only refuses to bow the head, but openly scoffs. And yet I am going to scoff and say ugly words about this fetish of ours. I am going to say that it represents ignorance, hides and causes hypocrisy, stands in the way of progress, drags low the standard of individual excellence, perpetuates many foul practices.
Let me admit at the outset that I recognize in the institution of marriage a perfectly legitimate result of the working of the law of evolution. Of course it is; and the same may be said of everything that exists whether good or evil. Every vile and filthy thing, crime, disease, misery, are all equally legitimate products of the working of this law. Evolution is simply the process of the logical working of things; it explains how things come to be; and there is nothing in the nature of the law to enable it to give to its results the hall mark of sterling. A thing is because of something else that was. Marriage is because of a primeval club. Man craved woman and he procured her. Considering the beginnings of the institution of marriage, it is interesting, if nothing more, to consider the efforts of the priest to give it an attribute of sanctity, to call it a sacrament. In truth, marriage is the most artificial of the relations which exist in the social body. It is a device of man at his worst—a mixture of slavery, savage egotism and priestcraft. It is indicated by nothing in the physical constitution of either male or female. It is an anomaly; a contract which can be freely entered into by the most unfit, but which cannot be broken, though both parties wish it, though absolute unfitness be patent, though hell on earth be its result. The pretense must be abandoned that men and women marry in order to reproduce their kind. Nothing could be less true. Marriage legalizes reproduction, but is not caused by desire for it. Marriage is the hard and fast tying together of a man and a woman without the least regard to moral or physiological conditions. Marriage may be for pecuniary gain, or for social advancement; it may be at the will of a controlling parent, or, more commonly for St. Paul's reason, that it is better to marry than to burn; but never for the reason that the parties to it are fitted to each other for parenthood. That supreme consideration not only does not enter into either the preliminary or after-thought of the matter, but is even held to be an indecent topic of conversation between persons not already married to each other.
The constituents of the average marriage are a man over-stimulated sexually by mystery and ignorance, and a woman abnormally undersexed by the course of self-repression and self-mutilation which have been taught her from her earliest childhood as necessities of modesty, purity and virtue. And then out of the carefully cultivated repugnance of the woman and the savage, exulting, unrelenting passion of the man are produced children, frequently welcome, seldom premeditated. And we are asked to believe that out of such elements are created the best foundation for a race or nation. Surely, surely, that combination of conditions is the best for a race or a nation which produces the best individuals; and quite as surely we should strive to bring about those conditions which tend to produce the best individuals.