It must be repeated here that no law, however stringent, can prevent polygamy among groups of people who choose to live loosely and be monogamous only in appearance.  But such cases are not now under consideration.  Also, affectionate husbands like Samuel Pepys, and affectionate wives of the corresponding temperaments may, it appears, engage in transient casual adventures out of doors without breaking up their home life.  But within doors that home life may be regarded as naturally monogamous.  It does not need to be protected against polygamy:  it protects itself.

DIVORCE

All this has an important bearing on the question of divorce.  Divorce reformers are so much preoccupied with the injustice of forbidding a woman to divorce her husband for unfaithfulness to his marriage vow, whilst allowing him that power over her, that they are apt to overlook the pressing need for admitting other and far more important grounds for divorce.  If we take a document like Pepys’ Diary, we learn that a woman may have an incorrigibly unfaithful husband, and yet be much better off than if she had an ill-tempered, peevish, maliciously sarcastic one, or was chained for life to a criminal, a drunkard, a lunatic, an idle vagrant, or a person whose religious faith was contrary to her own.  Imagine being married to a liar, a borrower, a mischief maker, a teaser or tormentor of children and animals, or even simply to a bore!  Conceive yourself tied for life to one of the perfectly “faithful” husbands who are sentenced to a month’s imprisonment occasionally for idly leaving their wives in childbirth without food, fire, or attendance!  What woman would not rather marry ten Pepyses? what man a dozen Nell Gwynnes?  Adultery, far from being the first and only ground for divorce, might more reasonably be made the last, or wholly excluded.  The present law is perfectly logical only if you once admit (as no decent person ever does) its fundamental assumption that there can be no companionship between men and women because the woman has a “sphere” of her own, that of housekeeping, in which the man must not meddle, whilst he has all the rest of human activity for his sphere:  the only point at which the two spheres touch being that of replenishing the population.  On this assumption the man naturally asks for a guarantee that the children shall be his because he has to find the money to support them.  The power of divorcing a woman for adultery is this guarantee, a guarantee that she does not need to protect her against a similar imposture on his part, because he cannot bear children.  No doubt he can spend the money that ought to be spent on her children on another woman and her children; but this is desertion, which is a separate matter.  The fact for us to seize is that in the eye of the law, adultery without consequences is merely a sentimental grievance, whereas the planting on one man of another man’s offspring