young couples are not even allowed to contract themselves out in marriage unconditionally.  We see this, for instance, in the wise legislation of the Romans.  Even under the Christian Emperors that sound principle was maintained and the lawyer Paulus wrote:[361] “Marriage was so free, according to ancient opinion, that even agreements between the parties not to separate from one another could have no validity.”  In so far as the essence and not any accidental circumstance of the marital relationships is made a contract, it is a contract of a nature which the two parties concerned are not competent to make.  Biologically and psychologically it cannot be valid, and with the growth of a humane civilization it is explicitly declared to be legally invalid.

For, there can be no doubt about it, the intimate and essential fact of marriage—­the relationship of sexual intercourse—­is not and cannot be a contract.  It is not a contract but a fact; it cannot be effected by any mere act of will on the part of the parties concerned; it cannot be maintained by any mere act of will.  To will such a contract is merely to perform a worse than indecorous farce.  Certainly many of the circumstances of marriage are properly the subject of contract, to be voluntarily and deliberately made by the parties to the contract.  But the essential fact of marriage—­a love strong enough to render the most intimate of relationships possible and desirable through an indefinite number of years—­cannot be made a matter for contract.  Alike from the physical point of view, and the psychical point of view, no binding contract—­and a contract is worthless if it is not binding—­can possibly be made.  And the making of such pseudo-contracts concerning the future of a marriage, before it has even been ascertained that the marriage can ever become a fact at all, is not only impossible but absurd.

It is of course true that this impossibility, this absurdity, are never visible to the contracting parties.  They have applied to the question all the very restricted tests that are conventionally permitted to them, and the satisfactory results of these tests, together with the consciousness of possessing an immense and apparently inexhaustible fund of loving emotion, seem to them adequate to the fulfilment of the contract throughout life, if not indeed eternity.

As a child of seven I chanced to be in a semi-tropical island of the Pacific supplied with fruit, especially grapes, from the mainland, and a dusky market woman always presented a large bunch of grapes to the little English stranger.  But a day came when the proffered bunch was firmly refused; the superabundance of grapes had produced a reaction of disgust.  A space of nearly forty years was needed to overcome the repugnance to grapes thus acquired.  Yet there can be no doubt that if at the age of six that little boy had been asked to sign a contract binding him to accept grapes every day, to keep them always near him, to