polygamy limited to four wives, child marriages, and, nearer home, marriages of first cousins:  all of them abominations in the eyes of many worthy persons.  Not only may the respectable British champion of marriage mean any of these widely different institutions; sometimes he does not mean marriage at all.  He means monogamy, chastity, temperance, respectability, morality, Christianity, anti-socialism, and a dozen other things that have no necessary connection with marriage.  He often means something that he dare not avow:  ownership of the person of another human being, for instance.  And he never tells the truth about his own marriage either to himself or any one else.

With those individualists who in the mid-XIXth century dreamt of doing away with marriage altogether on the ground that it is a private concern between the two parties with which society has nothing to do, there is now no need to deal.  The vogue of “the self-regarding action” has passed; and it may be assumed without argument that unions for the purpose of establishing a family will continue to be registered and regulated by the State.  Such registration is marriage, and will continue to be called marriage long after the conditions of the registration have changed so much that no citizen now living would recognize them as marriage conditions at all if he revisited the earth.  There is therefore no question of abolishing marriage; but there is a very pressing question of improving its conditions.  I have never met anybody really in favor of maintaining marriage as it exists in England to-day.  A Roman Catholic may obey his Church by assenting verbally to the doctrine of indissoluble marriage.  But nobody worth counting believes directly, frankly, and instinctively that when a person commits a murder and is put into prison for twenty years for it, the free and innocent husband or wife of that murderer should remain bound by the marriage.  To put it briefly, a contract for better for worse is a contract that should not be tolerated.  As a matter of fact it is not tolerated fully even by the Roman Catholic Church; for Roman Catholic marriages can be dissolved, if not by the temporal Courts, by the Pope.  Indissoluble marriage is an academic figment, advocated only by celibates and by comfortably married people who imagine that if other couples are uncomfortable it must be their own fault, just as rich people are apt to imagine that if other people are poor it serves them right.  There is always some means of dissolution.  The conditions of dissolution may vary widely, from those on which Henry VIII. procured his divorce from Katharine of Arragon to the pleas on which American wives obtain divorces (for instance, “mental anguish” caused by the husband’s neglect to cut his toenails); but there is always some point at which the theory of the inviolable better-for-worse marriage breaks down in practice.  South Carolina has indeed passed what is called a freak law declaring that a marriage shall not be dissolved under any circumstances; but such an absurdity will probably be repealed or amended by sheer force of circumstances before these words are in print.  The only question to be considered is, What shall the conditions of the dissolution be?