a fairly satisfactory appearance of decorum; they are a real protection against various accidents.  But the price at which they furnish these advantages is serious, and the advantages themselves only exist under unnatural conditions.  The corset cramps the form and the healthy development of the organs; it enfeebles the voluntary muscular system; it is incompatible with perfect grace and beauty; it diminishes the sum of active energy.  It exerts, in short, the same kind of influence on physical responsibility as formal marriage on moral responsibility.

It is too often forgotten, and must therefore be repeated, that married people do not remain together because of any religious or legal tie; that tie is merely the historical outcome of their natural tendency to remain together, a tendency which is itself far older than history.  “Love would exist in the world to-day, just as pure and just as enduring,” says Shufeldt (Medico-Legal Journal, Dec., 1897), “had man never invented ‘marriage.’  Truly affined mates would have remained faithful to each other as long as life lasted.  It is only when men attempt to improve upon nature that crime, disease, and unhappiness step in.”  “The abolition of marriage in the form now practiced,” wrote Godwin more than a century ago (Political Justice, second edition, 1796, vol. i, p. 248), “will be attended with no evils.  We are apt to represent it to ourselves as the harbinger of brutal lust and depravity.  But it really happens in this, as in other cases, that the positive laws which are made to restrain our vices irritate and multiply them.”  And Professor Lester Ward, in insisting on the strength of the monogamic sentiment in modern society, truly remarks (International Journal of Ethics, Oct., 1896) that the rebellion against rigid marriage bonds “is, in reality, due to the very strengthening of the true bonds of conjugal affection, coupled with a rational and altogether proper determination on the part of individuals to accept, in so important a matter, nothing less than the genuine article.”  “If by a single stroke,” says Professor Woods Hutchinson (Contemporary Review, Sept., 1905), “all marriage ties now in existence were struck off or declared illegal, eight-tenths of all couples would be remarried within forty eight hours, and seven-tenths could not be kept asunder with bayonets.”  An experiment of this kind on a small scale was witnessed in 1909 in an English village in Buckinghamshire.  It was found that the parish church had never been licensed for marriages, and that in consequence all the people who had gone through the ceremony of marriage in that church during the previous half century had never been legally married.  Yet, so far as could be ascertained, not a single couple thus released from the legal compulsion of marriage took advantage of the freedom bestowed.  In the face of such a fact it is obviously impossible to attach any moral value to the form of marriage.