Miss Kingsley said that she "had met many African men who were philosophers, thinking in the terms of fetich, but never a woman so doing."[1141]

On the facts of observation here enumerated nearly all will agree. The traits are certainly handed down by tradition and education. Whether they are evolutionary is far more doubtful. They are thought to be such by virtue of applications of some generalizations of evolutionary philosophy whose correctness, and whose application to this domain, have never been proved.

+360. The sex distinction; family institution; marriage in the mores.+ The division of the human race into two sexes is the most important of all anthropological facts. The sexes differ so much in structure and function, and consequently in traits of feeling and character, that their interests are antagonistic. At the same time they are, in regard to reproduction, complementary. There is nothing in the sex relation, or in procreation, to bring about any continuing relation between a man and a woman. It is the care and education of children which first calls for such a continuing relation. The continuing relation is not therefore "in nature." It is institutional and conventional. A man and a woman were brought together, probably against their will, by a higher interest in the struggle for existence. The woman with a child needed the union more, and probably she was more unwilling to enter it. It is almost impossible to find a case of a group in which marriage does not exist, and in which the sex relation is one of true promiscuity. We are told that there is no family institution amongst the Bako, dwarfs in Kamerun.

They obey animal instincts without restriction.[1142] This means that the origin of the family institution lies in the period before any group formations now open to our study, and promiscuity is an inference as to what preceded what we can find. A woman with a child entered into an arrangement with a man, whether the father or not was immaterial, by which they carried on the struggle for existence together. The arrangement must have afforded advantages to both. It was produced by an agreement. The family institution resulted and became customary by imitation. Marriage was the form of agreement between the man and the woman by which they entered into the family institution. In the most primitive form of life known to us (Australians and Bushmen) the man roams abroad in search of meat food. His wife or wives stay by the fire at a trysting place, care for the children, and collect plant food. Thus the combination comes under the form of antagonistic cooperation. It presents us the germ of the industrial organization. It is a product of the folkways, being the resultant custom which arises, in time, out of the ways of satisfying interests which separate individuals, or pairs, invent and try. It follows that marriage in all its forms is in the mores of the time and place.

+361. Regulation is conventional, not natural.+ The sex passion affects the weal or woe of human beings far more than hunger, vanity, or ghost fear. It has far more complications with other interests than the other great motives. There is no escaping the good and ill, the pleasure and pain, which inhere in it. It has two opposite extremes,--renunciation and license. In neither one of these can peace and satisfaction be found, or escape from the irritation of antagonistic impulses. There is no ground at all for the opinion that "nature" gave men an appetite the satisfaction of which would be peaceful and satisfactory, but that human laws and institutions have put it under constraints which produce agony.[1143] The truth is that license stimulates desire without limit, and ends in impotent agony. Renunciation produces agony of another kind.

Somewhere between lies temperance, which seems an easy solution, but there is no definition of temperance which is generally applicable, and, wherever the limit may be set, there, on either side of it, the antagonistic impulses appear again,--one of indulgence, the other of restraint,--producing pitfalls of vice and ruin, and ever renewing the strain and torment of the problem of right and duty. Therefore regulation is imperatively called for by the facts of "nature," and the regulation must come from intelligence and judgment. No determination of what the regulation should be has ever yet been found in law or ethics which does not bear harshly on great numbers, and in all stages of civilization numbers are found who violate the regulations and live outside of them.

+362. Egoistic and altruistic elements.+ Here, then, is the case: the perpetuation of the species requires the cooperation of two complementary sexes. The sex relation is antagonistic to the struggle for existence, and so arouses egoistic sentiments and motives, while it is itself very egoistic. It is sometimes said that the struggle for existence is egoistic and reproduction altruistic, but this view rests upon a very imperfect analysis. It means that a man who has won food may eat it by himself, while reproduction assumes the cooperation of others.

So far, well; but the struggle for existence assumes and demands co-operation in the food quest and a sharing of the product in all but a very small class of primitive cases; and the sex passion is purely egoistic, except in a very small class of cases of high refinement, the actuality of which may even be questioned. The altruistic element in reproduction belongs to the mores, and is due to life with children, affection for them, with sacrifice and devotion to them, as results produced by experience. It is clear that a division between the food quest as egoistic and reproduction as altruistic cannot be made the basis of ethical constructions. To get the good and avoid the ill there is required a high play of intelligence, good sense, and of all altruistic virtues. Under such a play of interests and feelings, from which no one is exempt, mass phenomena are produced by the ways of solving the problem which individuals and pairs hit upon. The wide range and contradictoriness of the folkways in regard to family life show how helpless and instinctive the struggle to solve the problem has been. Our own society shows how far we still are from a thorough understanding of the problem and from a satisfactory solution of it. It must be added that the ruling elements in different societies have molded the folkways to suit their own interests, and thus they have disturbed and confused the process of making folkways, and have spoiled the result.

+363. Primary definition of marriage; taboos and conventionalization.+ The definition of marriage consists in stating what, at any time and place, the mores have imposed as regulations on the relations of a man and woman who are cooperatively carrying on the struggle for existence and the reproduction of the species. The regulations are always a conventionalization which sets the terms, modes, and conditions under which a pair may cohabit. It is, therefore, impossible to formulate a definition of marriage which will cover all forms of it throughout the history of civilization. In all lower civilization it is a tie of a woman to a man for the interests of both (or of the man). It follows that the sex relation has been a great arena for the use and perfection of the mores, since personal experience and reflection never ceased, and a great school for the education of the race in the use of intelligence, the development of sympathetic sentiments, and in a sense of the utility of ethical regulations. The sex taboo is the set of inhibitions which control and restrain the intercourse of the sexes with each other in ordinary life. At the present time, in civilized countries, that intercourse is limited by taboo, not by law. The nature and degree of the taboo are in the mores. Spanish, French, English, and American women, in the order named, are under less and less strict limitations in regard to ordinary social intercourse with men. The sex taboo could, therefore, be easily pursued and described through the whole history of civilization and amongst all nations. It seems to be arbitrary, although no doubt it has always been due, in its origin, to correct or incorrect judgments of conditions and interests. It is always conventional. That it has been and is recognized is the sum of its justification. When Augustine met the objection that Jacob had four wives he replied that that was no crime, because it was under the custom (_mos_) of Jacob's time.[1144] This was a complete answer, but it was an appeal to the supreme authority of the mores.

+364. Family, not marriage, is the institution.+ Although we speak of marriage as an institution, it is only an imperfect one. It has no structure. The family is the institution, and it was antecedent to marriage. Marriage has always been an elastic and variable usage, as it now is. Each pair, or other marital combination, has always chosen its own "ways" of living within the limits set by the mores. In fact the use of language reflects the vagueness of marriage, for we use the word "marriage" for wedding, nuptials, or matrimony (wedlock). Only the last could be an institution. Wedlock has gone through very many phases, and has by no means evolved along lines of harmonious and advancing development. In the earliest forms of the higher civilization, in Chaldea and Egypt, man and wife were, during wedlock, in a relation of rational free cooperation. Out of this two different forms of wedlock have come, the harem system and pair marriage. The historical sequences by which the former has been produced could be traced just as easily as those which have led up to the latter. There is no more necessity in one than in the other. Wedlock is a mode of associated life. It is as variable as circumstances, interests, and character make it within the conditions. No rules or laws can control it. They only affect the condition against which the individuals react. No laws can do more than specify ways of entering into wedlock, and the rights and duties of the parties in wedlock to each other, which the society will enforce. These, however, are but indifferent externals. All the intimate daily play of interests, emotions, character, taste, etc., are beyond the reach of the bystanders, and that play is what makes wedlock what it is for every pair. Nevertheless the relations of the parties are always deeply controlled by the current opinions in the society, the prevalent ethical standards, the approval or condemnation passed by the bystanders on cases between husbands and wives, and by the precepts and traditions of the old. Thus the mores hold control over individual taste and caprice, and individual experience reacts against the control. All the problems of marriage are in the intimate relations. When they affect large numbers they are brought under the solution of the mores. Therefore the history of marriage is to be interpreted by the mores, and its philosophy must be sought in the fact that it is an ever-moving product of the mores.

+365. Endogamy and exogamy.+ Although it seems, at first consideration, that savages could not have perceived the alleged evils of inbreeding, yet a full examination of the facts is convincing that they did do so.

In like manner, they were led to try to avert overpopulation by folkways. They acted "instinctively," or automatically, not rationally.

Inbreeding preserves a type but weakens the stock. Outbreeding strengthens the stock but loses the type. In our own mores each one is forbidden to marry within a certain circle or outside of another circle.

The first is the consanguine group of first cousins and nearer. The latter is the race to which we belong. Royal and noble castes are more strictly limited within the caste. Amongst savage peoples there were two ideas which were in conflict: (1) all the women of a group were regarded as belonging to all the men of that group; (2) a wife conquered abroad was a possession and a trophy. Endogamy and exogamy are forms of the mores in which one of these policies has been adopted to the exclusion of the other. Of that we have an example in civilized society, where royal persons, in order to find fitting mates, marry cousins, or uncles, or nieces, and bring on the family the evils of close inbreeding (Spain); or they take slave women as wives and breed out the blood of their race (Athenians, Arabs). The due adjustment of inbreeding and outbreeding is always a difficult problem of policy for breeders of animals. It is the same for men. The social interests favor inbreeding, by which property is united or saved from dispersion, and close relationship seems to assure acquaintance. At Venice, in the time of glory and luxury, great dowers seemed to threaten to dissipate great family fortunes. It became the custom to contract marriages only between families which could give as much as they got. "This was not the least of the causes of the moral and physical decline of the Venetian aristocracy."[1145]

+366. Polygamy and polyandry.+ Polygamy and polyandry are two cases of family organization which are expedient under certain life conditions, and which came into existence or became obsolete according to changes in the life conditions, although there are also cases of survival, due to persistence of the mores, after the life conditions have so changed that the custom has become harmful. Population, so far as we know, normally contains equal numbers of the two sexes, except that there are periods in which, for some unknown reason, births of one sex greatly preponderate over those of the other.[1146] There are also groups in which the food quest, or other duty, of the men is such that many lives are lost and so the adults of the two sexes are unequal in number.[1147]

Therefore, in a normal population, polygamy would compel many men, and polyandry many women, to remain unmarried. Polyandry might then be supplemented by female infanticide. That any persons in a primitive society should be destined to celibacy is so arbitrary and strange an arrangement that strong motives for it must be found in the life conditions. Two forms of polygamy must be distinguished. (_a_) In primitive society women are laborers, and the industrial system is often such that there is an economic advantage in having a number of women to one man. In those cases polygamy becomes interwoven with the whole social and political system. Other customs will also affect the expediency of polygamy. Every well-to-do man of the Bassari, in Togo, has three wives, because children are suckled for three years.[1148]

(_b_) In higher civilization, with surplus wealth, polygamy is an affair of luxury, sensuality, and ostentation. It is only in the former case that polygamy is socially expedient, and that women welcome more wives to help do the work and do not quarrel with each other. In the latter case, polygamy is an aberration of the mores, due to selfish force.

There are very many examples of polygamy in which the two motives are combined. These are transition stages. Polyandry is due to a hard struggle for existence or to a policy of not dividing property. A Spartan who had a land allotment was forced to marry. His younger brothers lived with him and sometimes were also husbands to his wife.

Wives were also lent out of friendship or in order to get vigorous offspring.[1149] Here state policy or the assumed advantage of physical vigor overrode the motives of monogamy which prevailed in the surrounding civilization. In Plautus's comedy _Stichus_ a case is referred to in which two slaves have one woman (wife). Roman epitaphs are cited in which two men jointly celebrate a common wife.[1150] These are cases of return to an abandoned usage, under the stress of poverty.

An emigrating group must generally have contained more men than women.

Polyandry was very sure to occur. It is said that immigrant groups can be found in the United States in which polyandry exists, being produced in this way. Many aboriginal tribes in India, amongst which the Todas are the best known, practice polyandry. Przewalsky says that in Tibet polyandry is attributed to a tax on houses in which there is a married woman.[1151] Primarily it is due to poverty and a hard habitat. Two, three, or even four brothers have a wife in common. The Russian traveler adds that rich men have a wife each, or even two, and Cunningham[1152]

confirms this; that is to say, then, that the number of wives follows directly the economic power of the man. The case only illustrates the close interdependence of capital and marriage which we shall find at every stage. In the days of Venetian glory "often four or five men united to maintain one woman, in whose house they met daily to laugh, eat, and jest, without a shadow of jealousy. If, however, the cleverness of a woman brought a young patrician into a mesalliance, the state promptly dissolved the bond in its own way."[1153] The polyandry of the Nairs, on the Malabar coast, has been cited to prove that polyandry is not due to poverty. It is due to the unwillingness to subdivide the property of the family, which is of the modified mother-family form, all the immediate kin holding together and keeping the property undivided.

Subdivisions of this people differ as to details of the custom and it is now becoming obsolete. Of course "moral doctrines" have been invented to bring the custom under a broad principle.[1154] It appears, however, that the husbands, in the Nair system, are successive, not contemporaneous. The custom is due to the Vedic notion that every virgin contains a demon who leaves her with the nuptial blood, causing some risk to her husband. Hence a maiden was married to a man who was to disappear after a few hours, having incurred the risk.[1155] Here, then, we have a case of aberrant mores due to a superstitious explanation of natural facts. Polygamy of the second form above defined is limited by cost. Although polygamy is allowed under Mohammedan law, it is not common for a Mohammedan to have more than one wife, on account of expense and trouble. Lane estimated at not more than one in twenty the number of men in Egypt, in the first half of the nineteenth century, who had more than one wife. If a woman is childless, her husband may take another wife, especially if he likes the first one too well to divorce her.[1156] That is to say, polygamy and divorce are alternatives. Other authorities state that polygamy is more common and real amongst Mohammedans than would appear from Lane's statement. In the cities of Arabia more than one wife is the rule, and the Arabs in Jerusalem take three or four wives as soon as they have sufficient means. The poorest have at least two.[1157]

+367. Consistency of the mores under polygamy or polyandry.+ When the life conditions, real or imagined, produce polygamy, monogamy, or polyandry, all the mores conform to the one system or the other, and develop it on every side. All the concepts of right and wrong--rights, duties, authority, societal policy, and political interest--are implicit in the mores. They must necessarily all be consistent. A Nair woman is no more likely to overstep the mores of her society than an English woman is to overstep the mores of hers. "The relations between the sexes in Malabar are unusually happy."[1158] Tibetan men are said to be courteous to women.[1159] Tibetan women like polyandry. They sneer at the dullness and monotony of monogamic life.[1160] Thus the ethics follow the customs.

+368. Mother family and father family.+ The ultimate reasons for the mother family and for a change to the father family are in the life conditions, industrial arts, war, pressure of population, etc. In fact, our terms are only names for a group of mores which cover some set of interests, and we need to be on our guard against the category fallacy, that is, against arguing from the contents of the classification which we have made. The term "matriarchate" encouraged this fallacy and has gone out of use. By the mother family we mean the system in which descent and kin are reckoned through women, not through men. In that form of the family the relation of man and wife is one of contract. The woman must be thought of as at her home, with her kin, and the husband comes to her. She has great control of the terms on which he is accepted, and she and her kin can drive him away again, if they see fit.

The children will be hers and will remain with her. The property will remain hers, while her husband must abandon his property when he comes to her. The next male friend of a woman will be her brother, not her husband, and the next male guardian of a child will be his mother's brother, not his father. Words of relationship, address, etc., must all conform to the fundamental notion which rules the family. Religion, political control, modes of warfare and alliance, and education are all constructed to fit the family-form. At puberty boys are taken into the political organization (tribe) to which the father belongs and get political status from that. By birth each one is a member of a blood-kin group (clan) on which depend blood revenge and other duties and by which marriage is regulated. All this grows up as a part of the folkways, instinctively, without plan or guidance of intelligent control. Yet it has been wrought out, along the same logical lines of custom and rule, all over the world by savage peoples. We meet with many variations of it in transitional forms, or in combination with later institutions, but they belong to the time when this arrangement is breaking down, and passing into the father family. The mother family system is definite and complete when flourishing and normal. By the totem device the mother family is made capable of indefinite extension, and a verification is provided for its essential facts. The status of women, in the mother family, was strong and independent. Often important societal functions were entrusted to them, and their influence was so high that it produced great results, like the conferring of glory on braves, and the election of war chiefs. In cases, as for instance the ancient Lycians, the men were treated with harshness and abuse. The distribution of social power between the sexes gave opportunity for this, and the opportunity was seized.[1161]

+369. Change from mother family to father family.+ It may well be believed that the change from the mother family to the father family is the greatest and most revolutionary in the history of civilization. By changes in the life conditions it becomes possible for the man to get his wife to himself away from her kin, and to become the owner of his children. In the mother family those arrangements could only be suggested to him as modifications of his experience which would be eagerly to be desired, i.e. as objects of idealization. When the life conditions so changed that it became possible, the father family displaced the mother family. All the folkways followed the change.

Family arrangements, kin, industry, war, political organization, property, rights, must all conform to the change. The wife is obtained by capture, purchase, or later by contract. By capture or purchase she passes under her husband's dominion, and she may not be a consenting party. She loses status by the change. In the earlier period the man might get a wife by capture. She would be either a work-wife or a love-wife. Now a real status-wife would be obtained by real or fictitious capture and get her status from that fact; that is, she becomes very much at the mercy of her husband. The same is true of a purchased wife. The relation of a wife to her husband is analogous to property. The same is true of the relation of children to their father.

The husband gives, sells, or lends wife or daughters as he sees fit, although an interference with his dominion over them without his consent would be a thing to be earnestly resented. Loyalty and fidelity to husband became the highest duties of wives, which the husband enforced by physical penalties. Female honor, for wives, consisted in chastity, which meant self-submission to the limitations which men desired in wives and which the mores had approved, for the mores teach the women what conduct on their part is "right," and teach them that it is "right"

that they should be taken as wives by capture or purchase. Female virtue and honor, therefore, acquire technical definitions out of the mores, which are not parallel to any definitions of virtue and honor as applied to males. In Deut. xxi. 10 the case of a man enamored of a captive woman is considered, and rules are set for it. The woman may not be sold for money after she has been "humbled." It is evident that the notions of right and wrong, and of rights in marriage and the family, are altogether contingent and relative. In the mores of any form of the family the ideas of rights, and of right and wrong, will conform to the theory of the institution, and they may offer us notions of moral things which are radically divergent or antagonistic.

+370. Capture and purchase become ceremonies.+ As population increases and tribes are pushed closer together, capture loses violence and is modified by a compromise, with payment of money as a composition, and by treaty, until it becomes a ceremony. Then purchase degenerates into a ceremony, partly by idealization, i.e. the purchase ceremony is necessary, but the arrangement would seem more honorable if some other construction were put on it. The father, if he takes the customary bride price but is rich and loves his daughter, so that he wants to soften for her the lot of a wife as women generally find it, gives a dowry and by that binds her husband to stipulations as to the rights and treatment which she shall enjoy. In Homer's time, no man of rank and wealth gave his daughter without a dowry, although he took gifts for her, even, if she was in great demand, to a greater value.[1162] What the rich and great do sets the fashion which others follow as far as they can. In the laws of Manu we see purchase not yet obsolete, but already regarded as shameful, if it really is a sale, and so subjected to idealization; that is, they try to put another construction on it. The ceremonies of purchase and capture lasted for a very long time, because there was no other way to indicate the _bond_ of wedlock until the promise came into use. That has never furnished a bond of equal reality to that of capture or purchase.

+371. Feminine honor and virtue. Jealousy.+ As the old ceremonies become obsolete the property idea fades out of the marital relation, and the woman's exclusive devotion to her husband is no longer a rational inference from capture or purchase by him, but becomes a sentiment of sex. Idealization comes into play again and sets a standard of female honor and duty which rests on womanhood only, and therefore does not apply to men. It is the lot of every woman to stand beside some man, and to give her strength and life to help him in every way which circumstances offer opportunity for. Out of this relation come her ideas of her honor, duties, and virtue. Jealousy on the part of the husband also changes its sense. He thinks it an abomination to lend, sell, or give his wife. Jealousy is not now the sentiment of a property owner, but it is a masculine sex sentiment which corresponds to the woman's sex honor and duty. What she gives to him alone he accepts on the same basis of exclusiveness.

Darwin[1163] argued from the strength of jealousy amongst animals "as well as from the analogy of the lower animals, more particularly of those which come nearest to man," that promiscuity could not have prevailed shortly before man "attained his present rank in the zoological scale." Then he refers to the anthropoid apes, which are either monogamous, or pair off for a limited time, or are polygamous in separate families, or still again polygamous but living in a society. The jealousy of the males, and their special weapons for battling with their rivals, make promiscuity in a state of nature extremely improbable. "It does not seem possible for us to apprehend the emotion here called 'jealousy' when shown by an animal. Amongst uncivilized men the sentiment is that of the property holder. To lend or give a wife is consistent with that sentiment, not a violation of it.

Hence it does not prove that jealousy does not exist."[1164] The Veddahs are very careful of their wives. They will not allow strangers in their villages, and do not even let their brothers approach their wives or offer them food.[1165] They have pure marital customs. Their neighbors, the Singhalese, have not pure marital customs and are not jealous.[1166] In the East Indies, not in all tribes but in many, betrothed persons are separated until their marriage.[1167] Kubary says that the jealousy of the Palau Islanders is less a sign of wounded feelings than of care for external propriety.[1168] An oa ape (a gibbon) showed jealousy whenever a little Malay girl, his playmate, was taken away from him.[1169] Wellhausen[1170] says that "the suspicious jealousy, not of the love of their wives, but of their own property rights, is a prominent characteristic of the Arabs, of which they are proud." The blood kin guard their property right in the maiden as jealously as the man guards his property right in his wife. A Papuan kills an adulterer, not on account of his own honor, but to punish an infringement of his property rights.

The former idea is foreign to him. He does, however, show jealousy of a handsome young man who captivates the women.[1171]

In 1898 a pair of wolves were kept as public pets in the Capitol at Rome. The male killed a cub, his own offspring, out of jealousy of the affection of the female for it. Then the female died of grief.[1172] These cases show very different forms of jealousy. The jealousy of husband and wife is similar, but not the same as any one of them, and it differs at different stages of civilization. It depends on the exclusiveness and intenseness of devotion which spouses are held to owe each other. Beasts do not manifest an emotion of jealousy so uniform or universal as Darwin assumes in his argument, nor any sentiment like that of a half-civilized man. The latter can always coerce the woman to himself, but jealousy arises when the woman is left free to dispose of her own devotion or attention, and she is supposed to direct it to her husband, out of affection and preference. It is the breach of this affection and preference which constitutes the gravamen.

+372. Virginity.+ We have many examples of peoples amongst whom girls are entirely free until married, on the rational ground that they are under obligations to nobody. They are under no taboo, marriage being the first application of the sex taboo. Farnell[1173] says that the first sense of _parthenos_ was not "virgin," but unmarried. The Oriental goddess of impure love was parthenos. Artemis was perhaps, at first, a goddess of people who had not yet settled marriage mores, but had the mother family, amongst whom women were powerful. In the development of the father family fathers restricted daughters in order to make them more valuable as wives. Here comes in the notion of virginity and pre-nuptial chastity. This is really a negative and exclusive notion. It is an appeal to masculine vanity, and is a singular extension of the monopoly principle. His wife is to be his from the cradle, when he did not know her. Here, then, is a new basis for the sex honor of women and the jealousy of men. Chastity for the unmarried meant--no one; for the married--none but the husband. The mores extended to take in this doctrine, and it has passed into the heart of the mores of all civilized peoples, to whom it seems axiomatic or "natural." It has often been declared absurd that sex honor, especially for women, should be made to depend on a negative. It seems to make an ascetic and arbitrary standard for everyday life. In fact, however, the negation is imposed by the nature of the sex passion and by the conditions of human life. The passion tends to excess. What is "natural" is therefore evil. Negation, restraint, renunciation, are imposed by expediency. Perhaps it is the only case in which man is driven to error and evil by a great force in his nature, and is thus forced, if he would live well, to find a discipline for himself in intelligent self-control and in arbitrary rules. This would justify the current usage of language in which "morals" refers especially to the sex relation.

+373. Chastity for men.+ In modern times there is a new extension of idealization, by which it is attempted to extend to men the same standard of chastity and duty of chastity as to women. Two questions are here confused: (_a_) whether unmarried men and women are to be bound by the same obligation of chastity; (_b_) whether married men and women are to be bound by the same rule of exclusion. The Hindoo lawgivers demand the same fidelity from husband and wife.[1174] In the treatise on _Economics_ which is ascribed to Aristotle,[1175] although there is no dogmatic statement of law or duty, all the prescriptions for the husband and wife are the same, and the man is said to injure the wife by infidelity. Aristotle[1176] propounds the rule of taboo on all sex relations except in marriage, which is the doctrine of pair marriage (sec. 383). In the _Economicus_ of Xenophon[1177] the relations of husband and wife are expounded at length in terms of great respect and esteem for a wife. The work seems to be rhetorical and dramatic, not actual, and it is represented as very exceptional and astonishing that such relations should exist between any man and his wife. In Plutarch's _Morals_ the tract on "Conjugal Precepts" is written in an elevated tone. It is not specific and seems open to the suspicion of being a "pose." However, the doctrine is that of equal duty for husband and wife, and it may be taken to prove that that was the doctrine of the neostoics. Seneca wrote, "You know that it is a base thing that he who demands chastity of his wife should himself corrupt the wives of others."[1178] And again, "Let him know that it will be the worst kind of an injury to his wife for him to have a mistress."[1179] Augustine tells a story that Antoninus Pius granted a man a divorce for adultery of his wife, provided the man could show that he had, by his mode of life, maintained fidelity to his wife, and that the emperor added the dictum that "it would be unjust that a man should be able to exact a fidelity which he did not himself observe."[1180] Augustine himself maintained the full equality of spouses in rights and duties. Ulpian said that "it seems to be very unjust that a man demands chastity of his wife while he himself does not show an example of it." This dictum got into the _Digest_ where the jurists of all succeeding ages could have it before their eyes.[1181] It did not often arrest their attention. These utterances, so far as they are sincere expressions of convictions, do not represent the conduct of any school, and perhaps not even that of the men who recorded them. They belong to a period of great corruption of the sex mores of the upper classes, and of rapid extension of such corruption to the lower classes. A character in Plautus's comedy of _The Merchant_[1182] complains of the difference in codes for unchaste husbands and unchaste wives. If every woman has to be content with one husband, why should not every man be forced to be content with one wife?

Jerome made the most explicit statement of the Christian rule: "Amongst us [Christians] what is not permitted to women is not permitted to men.

The same obligation is held to rest on equal conditions."[1183] This is the assertion of a celibate and an ascetic. Perhaps it may be held to apply to pre-marital duty, but it is doubtful whether he had that in mind. All the other statements quoted apply only to the mutuality of conjugal duty. Of all of them it must be said that they are isolated flights of moral enthusiasm, and by no means present the prevailing code or the mores of the time. They do not express the life rules which have ever yet been observed by any but selected and limited classes in any society. The writings of Chrysostom and Augustine show plainly that the Christians of Jerome's time did not practice the doctrine which he uttered. It has never yet been a part of the mores of any society that the same standards of chastity should be enforced against both sexes before marriage. "At the present day, although the standard of morals is far higher than in pagan Rome, it may be questioned whether the inequality of the censure which is bestowed on the two sexes is not as great as in the days of paganism."[1184] Conjugal affection has been the great cause of masculine fidelity in marriage. Laertes refused to take Eurykleia lest he should hurt his wife's feelings.[1185] Plutarch, in his tract on "Love," dwells upon its controlling power, its exclusiveness, and the devotion it cultivates. Observation and experience of this kind may have produced the modern conviction that a strong affection between spouses is the best guarantee of happiness and truth. This conviction, with the code which belongs with it, have spread further and further, through wider and wider classes, and it is now the accepted moral principle that there ought to be no sex gratification except inside of pair marriage. What that means is that no one could formulate and maintain in public discussion any other rule as more reasonable and expedient to be the guiding principle of the mores, although it has not yet become such. Also, "the fundamental truth that the same act can never be at once venial for a man to demand and infamous for a woman to accord, though nobly enforced by the early Christians, has not passed into the popular sentiment of Christendom."[1186] Passing by the assertion that the early Christians enforced any such rule, which may well be questioned, we ask: Why are these views not in the mores? Undoubtedly it is because they are dogmatic in form, invented and imposed by theological authority[1187] or philosophical speculation. They do not grow out of the experience of life and cannot be verified by it. Woman bears an unequal share of the responsibilities and duties of sex and reproduction just as certainly and justly as man bears an unequal share of the responsibilities and duties of property, war, and politics. The reasons are in ultimate physiological facts by virtue of which one is a woman and the other is a man.

+374. Love marriage. Conjugal affection. "Wife."+ It must be assumed that even in the lowest form of society a man may have preferred one woman to others, but love between a man and a woman is not a phenomenon of uncivilized society. It begins with wealth and luxury. Love stories can be found in very early folklore, legends, and poetry, but they belong to idealization, to romance and unreality. Realistic love stories are now hardly a century old. It is evident that they lead idealization.

They put cases and solve them, and every reader forms a judgment whether the case has actuality and whether the solution is correct. Love in half-civilization and in antiquity was erotic only. The Greeks conceived of it as a madness by which a person was afflicted through the caprice or malevolence of some god or goddess. Such a passion is necessarily evanescent. The ancient peoples in general, and the Semites in particular, did not think this passion an honorable or trustworthy basis of marriage. The Kaffirs think that a Christian wife, married for love, is shameful. They compare her to a cat, the only animal which, amongst them, has no value, but is obtained as a gift.[1188] The _gandharva_ marriage of the Hindoos was a love marriage, and was not honorable. It was free love and became, in practice, an entirely informal union without institutional guarantees.[1189] This would be, at best, a conscience marriage, to which a man would adhere from a sense of duty, the strength of which would depend on personal character only.

In all these cases the views entertained were justified, if love meant only erotic passion. On the other hand, we have seen (sec. 362) that conjugal love controls the will by the highest motives. It is based on esteem, confidence, and habit. It presents all varieties and degrees, from exploitation on one side and servility on the other, to good-fellowship on both sides. It depends on the way in which each pair arranges its affairs, develops its sentiments, and forms its habits.

Conjugal affection makes great demands on the good sense, spirit of accommodation, and good nature of each. These are very great pre-conditions. It is no wonder that they often fail. In no primitive or half-civilization does the word "wife" bear the connotations which it bears to us. In Levit. xxi. 1 a case may be seen in which a man's blood kin takes precedence of his wife. Arabs, in the time of Mohammed, did not think that the conjugal tie could be as serious and strong as the kin tie, because the former is institutional only; that is, it is a product of convention and contract.[1190] Public demonstrations of love they thought offensive and insulting to the woman. People of rank often admitted no suitors for their daughters. It was thought a disgrace to give a daughter into the power of an outsider. They killed female infants, not, like the poor, because they could not afford to rear them, but from fear of incurring disgrace from them.[1191] By veiling the women are excluded from all social intercourse with men and from any share in intellectual interests.[1192] They cannot win conjugal affection--certainly not from educated men. Erotic passion fills Mohammedan poetry and is cultivated at home. The few cultivated women of the higher classes emancipate themselves from moral restraints, often without concealment.[1193] In Mohammed's last sermon he said: "You have rights against your wives and they have rights against you. They are bound not to violate marital fidelity and to commit no act of public wrong. If they do so, you have the power to beat them, yet without danger to their lives."[1194] Islam is not a field in which conjugal affection could be expected to develop.[1195] "A Japanese who should leave his father and mother for his wife would be looked upon as an outcast." Therefore the Bible "is regarded as irreligious and immoral."[1196] The notion that a man's wife is the nearest person in the world to him is a relatively modern notion, and one which is restricted to a comparatively small part of the human race.

+375. Heroic conjugal devotion.+ In general, the European analogy for the relation of husband and wife in the rest of the world, now or in past ages, would be rather that of master and servant. The erotic sentiment has generally been thought of as independent of marriage, possible in it, generally outside of it; and it has often been thought of as improper and disgusting between husband and wife. There is a poetical suggestion in Homer that marriages are made in heaven. Zeus is said to select a man's wife with a view to the fate allotted to him.[1197] Achilles says that every wise and noble man cherishes his wife.[1198] Ulysses says, "Nothing is better or more conducive to prosperity than that husband and wife should live together in concord."[1199] Hector and Andromache manifested faultless conjugal affection. Penelope was a type of the devoted wife, a type which must be ranked lower than that of Andromache, because it does not imply equality of the spouses. Valerius Maximus (fl. 25 A.D.)[1200] gave a chapter to "Conjugal Love." He found a few cases in which spouses, both male and female, had died for or on account of each other. They do not represent the mores. There is a tragic or heroic element in them all. That is the way in which conjugal love would strike the mind of an ancient man in his most serious moments. Apuleius[1201] gives the case of Charites who had intense love for her husband. Her base lover was a victim of erotic passion. Stobaeus (fifth or sixth century A.D.) collected and classified passages from Greek authors on various topics. Titles 63 to 73 are about women and marriage. The views expressed run to both extremes of approval and disapproval. No one of the writers has apparently any notion of conjugal affection. In some cases under the tyrannical Roman emperors of the first century women showed extreme wifely devotion.[1202] Roman tombstones (not unimpeachable witnesses) testify to conjugal affection between spouses.[1203] In the Icelandic sagas women show heroic devotion to their husbands, although they make their husbands much trouble by self-will and caprice.[1204] The barbarian invaders of the Roman empire are reported to have been remarkable for conjugal fidelity. Salvianus excepts the Alemanni.

+376. Hindoo models and ideals.+ In the Mahabharata, the heroic poem of Brahminism dating from about the beginning of the Christian era, much attention is given to beauty and love. Many marriages are made for love, which is regarded as the best motive. A love relation needed the approval of the girl's parents, otherwise it ran down to the _gandharva_ form. A hero, who abducted a girl for his brother, released her when she pleaded that she loved another to whom she had given her promise, although her father did not yet know it. The favored lover renounced her on account of the abduction, but she said that she would never choose another. "Whether he lives long or only a short time, whether he is rich in virtue or poor, the husband is chosen once for all. When once the heart has decided and the word has been spoken, let the thing be done."[1205] These words are now regarded in Hindostan as the completest and noblest possible expression of marriage and the woman's attitude to it. A model wife in the heroic period was amiable to all, and made herself beloved by politeness and friendliness, and by her virtue and proper behavior. She gave great attention to her parents-in-law. She was reserved in speech and submissive, and she charmed her husband by her grace, wit, and tenderness.[1206] The Mahabharata contains episodes of strong devotion of men to their wives and of heroic self-sacrifice of wives for their husbands. In Hindostan now the relations of husband and wife are not mutual. The man's mother must always be the first to him.

"This is in full accordance with the national sentiment which stigmatizes affection which asks for equal return as shop-keeping."[1207] "Who talks of vulgar equality," asks the Hindoo wife, "when she may instead have the unspeakable blessedness of offering worship."[1208]

+377. Slavonic sex mores.+ The southern Slavs and people of the Caucasus have allowed their sex mores to run into some extreme forms which to outsiders seem vicious. Young married women contract a very intimate relation to their bride attendants, of whom two attend a bride on her wedding day. She is but a girl, and is given to a man whom she never saw before, does not like, and never can like; she comes into a strange house where it is of the first importance for the rest of her life that she shall please her parents-in-law by the greatest humility and submission; she is forbidden by custom to approach her husband freely; she scarcely sees him during the day; yet she may freely converse with his brothers, who were her bride attendants. The elder one, if he is married, and if he is polite to her, becomes her best friend. An Albanian who has been away at work will not bring back a gift for his wife. He shows more attention to the wife of his elder brother. The Servian bride is ashamed of her marital relation, and thinks it indecent to address her husband in public, even after she has borne him children.

He remains a stranger to her, and her relation to him is scarcely more than that of sex. Her brother she loves beyond any other. She will mourn for him with the deepest sorrow, but it would be a shame for a woman to mourn for her husband, much more for a bride to mourn for her bridegroom. In former times it was improper for a man to begin conjugal life immediately after marriage. The bride attendants, brothers of the groom, spent the first night by the side of the bride, and for the next three nights the mother or sister of the groom slept with the bride. The groom is reluctant. A Servian woman is derided if she has a child within a year after marriage. In some districts sex morality is very high, in others very low. In Carinthia it is worst. There, in the Gurkthal, the illegitimate births are twice as numerous as the legitimate, so that the marriage institution hardly exists. In Slavonic Croatia persons who marry are indifferent to each other's previous conduct with others.

Amongst other southern Slavs, at a wedding, the groom must neither talk nor eat, out of shame, and the bride must weep while being dressed. It is reported from Bocca di Cattaro, in the Balkan peninsula, that public contempt is so severe against illicit acts by men before marriage that such acts are very rare amongst those who have any reputation or position to lose.[1209]

+378. Russian sex mores.+ A custom widely prevalent through parts of Great Russia and the adjacent Slavonic regions, until the nineteenth century, was that the father married his son, as a boy, to a marriageable young woman, whom the father then took as his own concubine. When the son grew up his wife was advanced in life and the mother of several children. He then did what his father had done. The large house and joint family offered temptation to this custom, and has generally been believed to be to blame for it. Rhamm contradicts that opinion.[1210] The same custom existed amongst the Bulgarians.[1211]

Another motive for it is suggested, that the father wanted to increase the number of laborers in the big house. In 1623, in Poland, the death penalty was provided for a man who should so abuse his daughter-in-law.

[1212] The same custom is reported from the Tamils of southeast India.[1213] In the mountains on the southwestern frontier of Russia there was, in the eighteenth century, an almost entire lack of sex mores. Amongst all the Slavonic peoples females are in a very inferior status and owe formal deference to males. In Bulgaria the wives are from five to ten years older than the husbands, because boys of fourteen begin to make love, but to adult marriageable women.[1214] All these facts make it a phenomenon worthy of special mention that the people of the Ukrain are very continent, cherish a high ideal of love between the sexes, and greatly dislike all improprieties in language and conversation.[1215] The popular Russian wedding songs are sad. The bride is addressed as a happy child, free in her father's house, with a sad future before her, of which she is blissfully ignorant.[1216] In Karelia "a bride radiant with happiness is an unknown sight. With the betrothal begins the time of tears, which lasts until the marriage feast in the house of the bridegroom. Even if she is happy and contented the mores require that she shall shed tears and affect sadness."[1217] The "wailer" is a functionary in a Russian village. She teaches the bride to bewail the loss of her "maiden freedom."[1218]

+379. Tribes of the Caucasus and Sahara.+ The Cherkess of the Caucasus live in big houses, in a joint family, under the authority of a patriarch. Wives were bought or captured in common, but so many as the men. Darinsky thinks that those who could, and wanted to, buy separate wives threatened the arrangement. Hence the men, in a body, opposed monogamic unions. Such unions were a crime against the crowd. Hence the customs arose which are now prevalent,--the concealment of all marital relations, the public ignoring of each other by the spouses, and the practical jokes and horseplay at weddings by boys and neighbors. It is a survival of old manifestations of opposition and disapproval.[1219] The men of the tribes in Sahara are often absent for days together. This gives the women liberty. The men begrudge this and punish the women for assumed infidelity. Some of the women are famous prostitutes.[1220]

+380. Mediaeval sex mores.+ The mediaeval sex mores were produced out of two opposite currents of thought,--that women were evil and dangerous and to be shunned, and that women were lovely and adorable, and worthy of reverence and worship. Both of these sets of ideas degenerated into folly and vice, and became modes of selfishness and luxury. Elaborate hypocrisy and insincerity became common. Technical definitions of terms were used to obscure their ethical significance. _Minne_ came to have a bad meaning and was used for erotic passion. _Courtoisie_ became a term for base solicitation.[1221] Gower, in the _Vox Clamantis_ (1382), tried to distinguish and specify sensual love. He inclines to the monkish view of women, but he describes good and noble women. Alanus ab Insulis ([Symbol: cross] 1203) in his _De Planctu Naturae_[1222] bewailed the vices of mankind and the vicious relations of men and women. His aim is to distinguish between good and evil love. He wrote at the height of the woman cult. In the _Romaunt de la Rose_ the thing discussed seems to be positive vice. It is said that the way to win women is by lavish gifts.

The meretriciousness of women and their love of luxury are denounced. If a marriage turns out badly, the men say that God made it, but God is good, and evil is due to man.[1223] In the _Paston Letters_ (fifteenth century) marriage appears to be entirely mercenary.[1224] A girl tells her lover what her father will give with her. If he is not satisfied he must discontinue his suit.[1225] "My master asked mockingly if a man might not beat his own wife."[1226] The one love match in the book is that of Margaret Paston with a man who was a servant in the family.

Margaret's mother, the most interesting person in the _Letters_, although she left 20 to her grandson by this marriage, left nothing to her daughter. Schultz[1227] thinks that marriages turned out as well in the Middle Ages as now, and that adultery was no more frequent; also that ecclesiastics were not then more licentious than now. He quotes freely from Geiler and Murner, who were leading moral preachers of the fifteenth century. Geiler preached in Strasburg Cathedral. Murner was a Franciscan. Geiler is incredibly coarse and outspoken. He pretended to state cases within his knowledge of men who made gain of their wives, and of wives who entered into arrangements with their husbands to make gain for both. He preached from these as illustrative cases and tried to dissuade both men and women from matrimony.[1228] Chateau life was monotonous and stupid, especially for women, who were moreover partly secluded in special apartments. The young men and women had very little chance to meet. The hope of happiness for women was in marriage.[1229]

Although the woman's consent was necessary, she was controlled by her male relatives, even if a widow, but she had little individuality and generally welcomed a suitor at once.[1230] The jongleurs of the twelfth century were vulgar vagabonds. Love, in their conception, is sensual, and women are treated by them with great levity. The women, in their songs, woo the men. In the thirteenth century women are described as more dignified and self-respecting. Siegfried flogged his wife black and blue.[1231] Brunhild was also beaten by her husband. The women manifest great devotion to their husbands, especially in adversity, even fighting for them like men.[1232] We are constantly shocked at the bad taste of behavior. At Lubeck, if a young widow was married, the crowd made an uproar in front of the house and the bridegroom was forced to stand at show on a certain four-cornered stone in the midst of noisy music "in order to establish the good name of himself and wife."[1233] The carnival was an occasion of license for all the grossness and obscenity in the popular taste.[1234] The woman cult was a cult of free love and was hostile to honorable marriage. Even in the twelfth century there were complaints of corruption by bad literature. The nobles and knights degenerated in the crusades and in the Italian wars of the Hohenstaufen.[1235] "The doctrine of the church appeared to be a support of the family, but it was not such. On the contrary, the bonds of the family were more loosened than strengthened by the ascetic-hierarchical religiosity of the church."[1236] Dulaure[1237] quotes Gerson and Nicolas de Clemangis that convents in the fifteenth century were places of debauch. Geiler, in a sermon in Strasburg Cathedral, gave a shocking description of convents.[1238] A convent is described as a brothel for neighboring nobles.[1239] At the end of the fifteenth century the revolt and change in the mores which produced the Protestant schism caused the social confusion on which Janssen lays such stress in his seventh and eighth volumes. It was a case of revolution. The old mores broke down and new ones were not yet formed. The Protestants of the sixteenth century derided and denounced the Roman Catholics for the contradictions and falsehoods of celibacy, and the Catholics used against the Protestants the looseness as to marriage. Both were right.

+381. The standard of the "good wife." Pair marriage.+ It is safe to believe that if any woman ever entered into a marriage which was not repugnant to her she entered it with a determination to be a "good wife." Her education under the mores of the society around her gave her the notion and standard of a good wife. The modern sentiments of love and conjugal affection have been produced in the middle class. They probably have their roots in the mores of the bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages and in those of the lowest class of free people in the Greco-Roman empire. This middle class is the class which has taken control of modern society, and whose interests are most favored by modern economic developments. They have set aside the old ideas of male dominion and of ascetic purity. In the middle of the nineteenth century the poems of Coventry Patmore and the novels of Anthony Trollope perhaps best expressed the notions of conjugal affection which English-speaking people entertained at that time. It seems that now those notions are thought to be philistine, and there is a reaction towards the old aristocratic standards. The "good husband," as correlative to the good wife, belongs to modern pair marriage. The erotic element has been refined and suppressed, or at least disavowed. The ideals which have been accepted and favored have disciplined and concentrated masculine waywardness, and they have made the sex sentiments more durable. All this has integrated the family more firmly, and the family mores have cultivated and preserved the sentiments. We have seen many cases in which, out of the unconscious and unpremeditated action of the mores, results have been produced which have been most important for the weal or woe of men, but it is one of the most marvelous of these cases that conjugal affection, perhaps the noblest of all sentiments, should have been developed out of the monopolistic tyranny of men over women, and out of the ascetic negation of sex, the common element in which is a prurient and unhealthy sensuality.

+382. "One flesh."+ The notion or figure of "one flesh" is not peculiar to the Jewish or Christian religion. In the Old Testament it clearly refers to carnal union. It has been used to express the ideal that marriage should be the fusion of two lives and interests. It is instructive to notice, in all the discussions of marriage which are to be found in all ages, how few and commonplace are the things which have been said, and how largely refuge has been taken in figures of speech.

"One flesh," if not carnal, is only ritual, but ritual conceptions are only conventional conceptions,--good amongst those who agree to repeat the formulas and perform the ritual acts. They are not realities. The problem of marriage is that two human beings try to live together. They are two and not one. Since they are two, their tastes, desires, characters, and wills are two. Ethical philosophers or jurists may be able to define the "one-flesh" idea by translating it into rights and duties, but no state authority can enforce such a definition. Therefore it is nugatory. The idea belongs in an arena beyond state or family, where two make a world. It is beyond the mores also, except so far as the mores have educated the man and woman to a sense of the conduct which is necessary to marital harmony, by the judgments which are current on the hundreds of cases, real or imaginary, which come up for discussion. How then shall two wills be one will? The old way was that one will (the woman's) always was bound to yield. Since that no longer seems right, the modern way is endless discussion, a defeat for one, and all the inevitable consequences in daily experience and effect on character.

+383. Pair marriage.+ Pair marriage is the union of one man and one woman in which all the rights, duties, powers, and privileges are equal and alike for both, the relationship being mutual and reciprocal in all points. It therefore produces a complete fusion of two lives and interests. Pair marriage and all its attendant mores are products of monopoly. Herodotus[1240] says of the Agathyrsi that they practiced communalism of women in order that they might all be brethren, without envy or enmity to each other. That is one solution. In it peace and harmony are given a higher place than sex interests. Pair marriage aims at the highest satisfaction of sex interests by monopoly. It sacrifices peace and harmony. Any monopoly exists for the benefit of those who are embraced in it. Its evil effects are to be found by turning to those who fail to get entrance to it. While our mores now require that a man and woman shall come together through love, and therefore make a selection of the most special and exclusive kind, we have no apparatus or intelligent method for making such a selection. The notion that such a selection is necessary, therefore, adds a new difficulty and obstacle.

Pair marriage also, partly on account of the intenser sentiment of parenthood and the more integrated family institution, increases expense, and makes the economic conditions of marriage more severe. Pair marriage forces a large fraction of the population to celibacy, and it is they who are the excluded who suffer by that arrangement. This bears chiefly on women. Everything which violates the taboo in the mores is vice, and is disastrous to all who participate in it. The more real pair marriage is, the more disastrous is every illicit relation. The harm is infinitely greater for women than for men. Within the taboo, unmarried women lead aimless existences, or they are absorbed in an effort to earn a living which is harassed by especial obstacles and difficulties. This is the price which has to be paid for all the gain which women get from pair marriage as compared with any other form of sex relation. It assumes that every man and woman can find a mate, which is not true.

Very little serious attention is paid to this offset to the advantages of pair marriage. The mores teach unmarried women that it is "right"

that things should be so, and that any other arrangement would contain abominations which are not to be thought of. Probably the unmarried women rarely think of themselves as victims of the arrangement by which their married sisters profit. They accept a life career which is destitute of self-realization, except for those few who are so gifted that they can make independent careers in the struggle for existence.

Nearly all our discussions of our own social order run upon questions of property. It is under the sex relation that all the great problems really present themselves.

+384. Marriage in modern mores.+ It is very remarkable that marriage amongst us has become the most distinct example there is, and the most widespread, of ritual (what is said in the marriage ceremony, in its rational sense, is of little importance, and people rarely notice it.

What force attaches to "obey"?), of religious intervention in private affairs, and of the importance attached to a ceremony. If two people cohabit, the question of right and wrong depends on whether they have passed through a certain ceremony together or not. That determines whether they are "married" or not. The reason is, because if they have passed through the ceremony together, no matter what was said or done, they have expressed their will to come into the status of wedlock, as the mores make it and as the state enforces it, at the time and place.

The woman wants to "feel that she is married." Very many women would not feel so in a civil marriage; others want a "fully choral" ceremony; others want the communion with the wedding ceremony. Perhaps the daughter of a great nobleman might not feel married without a marriage settlement. Thus the active effect of the mores may be observed in contemporary custom, and it is seen how completely the notion of being duly married is produced by the mores of the society, or of a class or sect in it.

+385. Pair marriage; its technical definition.+ Polyandry passed over into polygamy when sufficient property was at command.[1241] There was a neutral middle point where one man had one wife. It follows that monogamy is not a specific term. It might be monogamy if one man had one wife but also concubines and slaves, or he might have but one wife in fact, although free to have more if he chose. The term "pair marriage"

is needed as a technical term for the form of marriage which is as exclusive and permanent for the man as for the woman, which one enters on the same plane of free agreement as the other, and in which all the rights and duties are mutual. In such a union there may be a complete fusion of two lives and interests. In no other form of union is such a fusion possible. This pair marriage is the ideal which guides the marital usages of our time and civilization, gives them their spirit and sense, and furnishes standards for all our discussions, although it is far from being universally realized. The ideal is made an object of "pathos"[1242] in our popular literature. Whence did it come? In truth, we can hardly learn. It existed, by necessity of poverty and humble social status, in the classes amongst whom Christianity took root. It found expression in the canon law. It resisted, in the lower classes, the attempt of the church to suppress it in order to aggrandize the corporation. It resisted, in the same classes, the corruption of the Renaissance. It has risen with those classes to wealth and civil power.