the intervention of any law.  It will be equally difficult to perceive the transference of the control of marriage from the State to the individuals concerned, and the more difficult because, as we shall see, although the essential and intimately personal fact of marriage is not a proper matter for State control, there are certain aspects of marriage which touch the interests of the community so closely that the State is bound to insist on their registration and to take an interest in their settlement.

The result of dissolving the formal stringency of the marriage relationship, it is sometimes said, would be a tendency to an immoral laxity.  Those who make this statement overlook the fact that laxity tends to reach a maximum as a result of stringency, and that where the merely external authority of a rigid marriage law prevails, there the extreme excesses of license most flourish.  It is also undoubtedly true, and for the same reason, that any sudden removal of restraints necessarily involves a reaction to the opposite extreme of license; a slave is not changed at a stroke into an autonomous freeman.  Yet we have to remember that the marriage order existed for millenniums before any attempt was made to mould it into arbitrary shapes by human legislation.  Such legislation, we have seen, was indeed the effort of the human spirit to affirm more emphatically the demands of its own instincts.[365] But its final result is to choke and impede rather than to further the instincts which inspired it.  Its gradual disappearance allows the natural order free and proper scope.

The great truth that compulsion is not really a force on the side of virtue, but on the side of vice, had been clearly realized by the genius of Rabelais, when he said of his ideal social state, the Abbey of Thelema, that there was but one clause in its rule:  Fay ce que vouldras.  “Because,” said Rabelais (Bk. i, Ch.  VII), “men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompts them unto virtuous actions and withdraws them from vice.  These same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they freely were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude.”  So that when a man and a woman who had lived under the rule of Thelema married each other, Rabelais tells us, their mutual love lasted undiminished to the day of their death.

When the loss of autonomous freedom fails to lead to licentious rebellion it incurs the opposite risk and tends to become a flabby reliance on an external support.  The artificial support of marriage by State regulation then resembles the artificial support of the body furnished by corset-wearing.  The reasons for and against adopting artificial support are the same in one case as the other.  Corsets really give a feeling of support; they really furnish without trouble