Every marriage in the world probably lacks something of perfection.  There are no perfect human beings, and, therefore, hardly, perhaps, a perfect marriage; and to my mind those who do not admit the concern of the community in their marriage do lack something.  But to suppose that those people are immoral, when others who live together, legally licensed to do so, in selfishness, in infidelity, for financial reasons, or for social reasons, are moral is fundamentally dishonest.  When a woman sells her body for money, do you think that it makes it moral that she does it in a church or in a registry office?  Is there one whit of difference, morally, between the prostitution that has no legal recognition and the prostitution that has?  Is it anything but prostitution to sell yourself for money, whether you are a man or a woman?  Do you imagine that because you have a contract to protect you while you do it, you are doing what is moral?  If you marry for any reason but love—­for experience, to “complete your nature”—­without much regard to the man or woman you marry, or to the children you bring into the world, are you not exploiting human nature just as certainly, though not so brutally, as a man who buys a woman in the street?  It is not so base a form of exploitation, God knows; that I admit; but when there is any element of exploitation in the bargain it is not made more truly moral because it happens to be blessed in a church or registered in an office.  The legal ceremony must be the outcome of a morality which makes you realize that what you do affects other people, that what you do most profoundly affects the children that you hope to have, and that the community has both an interest and a responsibility in all this.  That is “moral.”  But if the relationship thus to be legalized is not moral, it is dishonest to pretend that it can be made so by any ceremony which those concerned may undergo.

But, you will say, we cannot peer into other people’s lives and judge them in this kind of way.  How are we to know?  How are we, who have many friends, many neighbours, on whom our standards must react, to judge their lives?  We can tell who has gone through a legal ceremony and who refuses to do so.  That is a nice convenient rule by which we can judge and condemn such people.  But we cannot go poking into people’s lives and studying their motives and judging their fundamental moral standards!  No, you cannot.  Why should you?  This little set of iron rules makes it very easy to judge, does it not?  But why do you desire it to be easy to judge?  You and I know how infinite are the gradations between the most noble kind of chastity and the most ignoble kind of immorality; but which of us is to create a rigid standard and measure our friends and acquaintances against it?  We do not do it with the other virtues:  why do we desire to do it with this one?  Take such a virtue as truth.  Conceive the crystalline sincerity of some truth-loving minds, realize that