at marriage an important capital which is consumed in the first act of intercourse and can never be recovered.  That is a notion which has survived into civilization, but it belongs to barbarism and not to civilization.  So far as it has any validity it lies within a sphere of erotic perversity which cannot be taken into consideration in an estimation of moral values.  For most men, however, in any case, whether they realize it or not, the woman who has been initiated into the mysteries of love has a higher erotic value than the virgin, and there need be no anxiety on this ground concerning the wife who has lost her virginity.  It is probably a significant fact that this anxiety for the protection of women by the limitation of divorce is chiefly brought forward by men and not by women themselves.  A woman at marriage is deprived by society and the law of her own name.  She has been deprived until recently of the right to her own earnings.  She is deprived of the most intimate rights in her own person.  She is deprived under some circumstances of her own child, against whom she may have committed no offence whatever.  It is perhaps scarcely surprising that she is not greatly appreciative of the protection afforded her by the withholding of the right to divorce her husband.  “Ah, no, no protection!” a brilliant French woman has written.  “We have been protected long enough.  The only protection to grant women is to cease protecting them."[354] As a matter of fact the divorce movement appears to develop, on the whole, with that development of woman’s moral responsibility traced in the previous chapter, and where divorce is freest women occupy the highest position.

We cannot fail to realize as we grasp the nature and direction of the modern movement of divorce that the final tendency of that movement is to efface itself.  Necessary as the Divorce Court has been as the inevitable corollary of an impossible ecclesiastical conception of marriage, no institution is now more hideous, more alien to the instinctive feelings generated by a fine civilization, and more opposed to the dignity of womanhood.[355] Its disappearance and its substitution by private arrangements, effected on their contractive sides, especially if there are children to provide for, under legal and if necessary judicial supervision, is, and always has been, the natural result of the attainment of a reasonably high stage of civilization.  The Divorce Court has merely been a phase in the history of modern marriage, and a phase that has really been repugnant to all concerned in it.  There is no need to view the project of its ultimate disappearance with anything but satisfaction.  It was merely the outcome of an artificial conception of marriage.  It is time to return to the consideration of that conception.

We have seen that when the Catholic development of the archaic conception of marriage as a sacrament, slowly elaborated and fossilized by the ingenuity of the Canonists, was at last nominally dethroned, though not destroyed, by the movement associated with the Reformation, it was replaced by the conception of marriage as a contract.  This conception of marriage as a contract still enjoys a considerable amount of credit amongst us.