For my own part, I do not think the maintenance of a marriage that is indissoluble, that precludes the survivor from re-marriage, that gives neither party an external refuge from the misbehaviour of the other, and makes the children the absolute property of their parents until they grow up, would cause any very general unhappiness Most people are reasonable enough, good-tempered enough, and adaptable enough to shake down even in a grip so rigid, and I would even go further and say that its very rigidity, the entire absence of any way out at all, would oblige innumerable people to accommodate themselves to its conditions and make a working success of unions that, under laxer conditions, would be almost certainly dissolved.  We should have more people of what I may call the “broken-in” type than an easier release would create, but to many thinkers the spectacle of a human being thoroughly “broken-in” is in itself extremely satisfactory.  A few more crimes of desperation perhaps might occur, to balance against an almost universal effort to achieve contentment and reconciliation.  We should hear more of the “natural law” permitting murder by the jealous husband or by the jealous wife, and the traffic in poisons would need a sedulous attention—­but even there the impossibility of re-marriage would operate to restrain the impatient.  On the whole, I can imagine the world rubbing along very well with marriage as unaccommodating as a perfected steel trap.  Exceptional people might suffer or sin wildly—­to the general amusement or indignation.

But when once we part from the idea of such a rigid and eternal marriage bond—­and the law of every civilised country and the general thought and sentiment everywhere have long since done so—­then the whole question changes.  If marriage is not so absolutely sacred a bond, if it is not an eternal bond, but a bond we may break on this account or that, then at once we put the question on a different footing.  If we may terminate it for adultery or cruelty, or any cause whatever, if we may suspend the intimacy of husband and wife by separation orders and the like, if we recognise their separate property and interfere between them and their children to ensure the health and education of the latter, then we open at once the whole question of a terminating agreement.  Marriage ceases to be an unlimited union and becomes a definite contract.  We raise the whole question of “What are the limits in marriage, and how and when may a marriage terminate?”

Now, many answers are being given to that question at the present time.  We may take as the extremest opposite to the eternal marriage idea the proposal of Mr. Bernard Shaw, that marriage should be terminable at the instance of either party.  You would give due and public notice that your marriage was at an end, and it would be at an end.  This is marriage at its minimum, as the eternal indissoluble marriage is marriage at its maximum, and the only conceivable