Socialists urge that the institution of marriage is bound up with that of private property.  There is little doubt that the women’s suffrage movement tends to socialism, and, also, paradoxical as it may at first seem, to lax marriage laws and easy divorces.  “The single standard of morality” offered by all advanced women’s-rights advocates will necessarily be a levelling down, not a levelling up; and in a society where the life of the ordinary young woman is that which at least was that of the ordinary young man about town, it is hardly likely that there will be any stricter legislation.  Where a majority of young women live alone and earn their living, the old order must change.

Divorce, it should be known, is a modern institution; that is, divorce by the secular courts.  Such divorce as the Roman Church recognized, or was granted by act of Parliament, was the only divorce existing down to the year 1642, when one Hannah Huish was divorced in Connecticut by the General Court, “with liberty to marry again as God may grant her opportunity,” and about that time the Colony of Massachusetts Bay enacted the first law (with the possible exception of one in Geneva) permitting divorces by ordinary courts of law.

The age of consent means two things, or even three, which leads to much confusion.  It has a definite meaning in the criminal law, to be discussed later; and then it has a double meaning in the marriage law.  First, the age under which the marriage of a girl or boy is absolutely void; second, the age at which it is lawful without the consent of the parents.  The tendency of our legislation is to raise the latter age and possibly the former.  At least, marriages of very young persons may be absolutely cancelled as if they had never taken place.  According to all precedents, human and divine, from the Garden of Eden to Romeo and Juliet, “the age of consent” would by common sense appear to be the age at which the woman did in fact consent; such is the common law, but such is not usually law by our statutes.

But perhaps the legislation of the future is best represented by the extraordinary effort, whose beginning we now see, to prevent freedom of marriage Itself.  There is probably no human liberty, no constitutional right to property, or hardly, even, to one’s personal freedom, which has been more ardently asserted by all persons not actually slaves (and even, indeed, by them) than the right to love and marry.  In the rare instances where even priests have interfered, it has usually led to resentment or resistance.  The common law has never dared to.[1] Marriages between near relations, prohibited by the Mosaic law, were invalid by the church law, and became invalid by the secular law at the very late period when it began to have any jurisdiction over the matter, hardly in England half a century ago; in the United States, where we have never had canon law or church courts, the secular law took the Mosaic law from the time of the Massachusetts