_K._ 'It must have been a painful experience, but one gets accustomed to these tragedies, one hears of so many. There is always one who wants to be free, and one to remain bound.'

_M._ 'Yes; and the unwritten tradition that it is a matter of honour never to seek to hold an unwilling partner quite negatives the law that a marriage can only terminate when both parties desire it.'

_K._ 'I'm sure the tragedies of parting one hears of nowadays are far worse than the occasional tragedies in the old days, caused by being bound, and ever so much more frequent.'

_M._ 'It wouldn't be such an irony if _anyone_ were benefited, but as far as I can see the men suffer nearly as much as the women, especially when they are old. According to our early century newspapers, an old bachelor or widower could always get a young and charming wife, but now n.o.body will marry an elderly man, except the old ladies, and the men don't want them.'

_K._ 'It's a pity they don't, that would solve a lot of the unhappiness one sees around. It must be awful to be deserted in one's old age.'

_M._ 'Talking about the old newspapers, it's very amusing to read them in the British Museum, and see what wonderful things were expected of the leasehold marriage system when it was first legalised. All the abuses of the old system were to disappear: divorce, adultery, prost.i.tution, and seduction--all the social evils were to go in one clean sweep.'

_K._ 'How absurdly shortsighted people were then. Divorce is abolished, it's true, but the scandals and misery, broken hearts and broken homes that it caused are now multiplied a thousand times. Infidelity may be less frequent, but if people have the wish and the opportunity for it they're not likely to wait for a certain number of years, until it ceases to be technically a sin. The same with the other evils. There will always be a large number of men who postpone marriage for financial or other reasons, and a large number of women who can only earn a living in one way--the oldest profession in the world will always be kept going! Seduction, too, is not likely to cease as long as the law is so lenient to it. There will always be ignorant, silly, unprotected girls and always men to take advantage of them.'

_M._ 'There seem to be just as many elderly spinsters, too, as before; the women who don't attract men remain the same under any system, and often they are the best women.'

_K._ 'How strange it must be _never to have had a husband!_'

_M._ 'It must be peaceful, at anyrate; but spinsters don't look any happier than married women.'

_K._ 'I can only see one good result of the leasehold system--that women are as anxious for motherhood now as in the early century they were anxious to avoid it. We grow old with the fear of almost certain desertion and loneliness before us, and the one hope for our old age is our children----Oh! I am sorry, I forgot you had none.'

_M._ 'Never mind, I often think of it, and whenever Jack admires or pays attention to another woman, I am in terror for fear he has found a fresh attraction and may want to leave me. What stuff they used to write formerly about the necessity for love being free. As if freedom were such a glorious thing! Why, we are all slaves to some convention or pa.s.sion or theory; none of us are free, really free, and we wouldn't like it if we were. It may be all very well for the fantastic love of novels to be free, but that strange _need of each other_, which we call "love" in real life, for want of a better term--_that_ must be forged into a bond, or what help is it to us poor vacillating mortals? Love must be an Anchor in real life--nothing else is any use!'

III

THE FIASCO OF FREE LOVE

'The ultimate standards by which all men judge of behaviour is the resulting happiness or misery.'

'Conduct whose total results, immediate and remote, are injurious is bad conduct.' --HERBERT SPENCER.

Free love has been called the most dangerous and delusive of all marriage schemes. It is based on a wholly impossible standard of ethics.

Theoretically, it is the ideal union between the s.e.xes, but it will only become practical when men and women have morally advanced out of all recognition. When people are all faithful, constant, pure-minded, and utterly unselfish, free marriage may be worth considering. Even then, there would be no chance for the ill-favoured and unattractive.

Under present conditions no couple living _openly_ in free love is known to have made a success of it--a solid, permanent success, that is.

I believe there are couples who live happily together without any more durable bond than their mutual affection, but they wisely a.s.sume the respectable shelter of the wedding ring, and call themselves Mr and Mrs.

Thus their little fledgling of free love is not required to battle against the overwhelming force of social ostracism. And moreover one has no means of knowing how long these unions stand the supreme test of time. The two notable modern instances of free love that naturally rise to the mind are George Eliot and Mary G.o.dwin. But both the men with whom they mated were already married. As soon as Harriet was dead, Mary G.o.dwin married Sh.e.l.ley, and when George Lewes had pa.s.sed away, George Eliot married another man--an act which most people consider far less pardonable in the circ.u.mstances than her irregular union with Lewes.

Even the famous Perfectionists of Oneida relapsed into ordinary marriage on the death of their leader, Noyes, and by his own wish.

As an inst.i.tution, free love seems widely practised in the East End of London, but judging by the evidence of the police courts its results are certainly not encouraging. I am told that the practice is common among the cotton operatives of Lancashire. The _collage_ system is also very prevalent in France among the working cla.s.ses, and seems to answer well enough. But only when women have the ability and the opportunity to support themselves is free marriage at all feasible from the economic standpoint, and even then there remains the serious question of illegitimacy. All right-minded persons must acknowledge that the att.i.tude of society towards the illegitimate is unjust and cruel in the extreme, resulting as it does in punishing the perfectly innocent. But every grown man and woman is aware of this att.i.tude, and those who act in defiance of it, to please themselves or to satisfy some whim of experiment, do so in the full knowledge that on their child will fall a certain burden of lifelong disadvantage. Many perhaps are deterred from breaking the moral law by this knowledge, but the number of illegitimates born in England and Wales in 1905 was 37,300; and, in the interests of these unfortunate victims of others' selfishness, I think it is high time a more kindly and broad-minded att.i.tude towards their social disability was adopted.

I remember as a young girl going to see a play called _A Bunch of Violets_. The heroine discovers that her husband's previous wife is alive and that her child is therefore illegitimate. She tells her daughter to choose between the parents, explaining the worldly advantages of staying with her rich, influential father. The harangue concludes with words to the effect: 'With me you will be poor and shamed, and _you can never marry_.' Doubtless this ridiculous point of view was adopted solely for the benefit of the young girls in the audience, but its unreasonableness disgusted me for one. Even to the limited intelligence of seventeen it is obvious that, since a name is of so much importance in life, an illegitimate girl had better marry as quickly as she possibly can, in order to obtain one!

Free love has recently been much discussed in connection with socialism, and, thanks no doubt to the misrepresentations of certain newspapers, the idea seems to have gained ground that the abolition of marriage and the subst.i.tution of free love was part of the socialist programme.

No more untrue charge could possibly be made, as inquiries at the headquarters of the various socialist bodies will quickly prove.

The people who advocate free love are very fond of arguing that so personal a matter only concerns themselves. All who think thus should have had a grave warning in a recent _cause celebre_, in which murder, attempted suicide, permanent maiming, and a tangle of misery involving innocent children down to the third generation, were proved to have resulted from a 'free' union entered on nearly thirty years before. This and the many other tragedies of free love, which appear in the newspapers from time to time, seem to prove the mistake of imagining that we are accountable to none for our actions. A relationship which affects the future generation can never be a private and personal matter. E. R. Chapman in a very interesting essay on marriage published some years ago says: 'To exchange legal marriage for mere voluntary unions, mere temporary partnerships, would be not to set love free, but to give love its death blow by divorcing it from that higher human element which is the note of marriage, rightly understood, and which places regard for order, regard for the common weal above personal interest and the mere self-gratification of the moment.'

IV

POLYGAMY AT THE POLITE DINNER-TABLE

'Last and hardest of all to eradicate in our midst, comes the monopoly of the human heart which is known as marriage ... this ugly and barbaric form of serfdom has come in our own time by some strange caprice to be regarded as of positively divine origin.'

--GRANT ALLEN.

We call it the polite dinner-table, because we never hesitate to be extremely rude to each other, when necessary for the purposes of argument. On this particular occasion, the inevitable marriage discussion, which is always to be found in one or other of the newspapers, was the subject of conversation, and the Good Stockbroker (unmarried) was vigorously defending the Holy Estate. His moral att.i.tude is certainly somewhat boring, but nevertheless the Good Stockbroker is one of those people to whom one really is polite. Although obvious irritation was visible on the face of the Family Egotist we listened respectfully, with the exception of the Wicked Stockbroker, whose dinner was far too important in his scheme of life to be trifled with by moral conversations.

Whatever the Good Stockbroker says the Weary Roue is of course bound to contradict as a matter of honour. I may mention that the Weary Roue is a man of the highest virtue and a model husband and father. His pose of evil experience has gained him his sarcastic nickname, but in no way has he earned it by his conduct. 'You forget,' he interposed languidly, when the Good Stockbroker paused, 'that no less a philosopher than Schopenhauer said that the natural tendency of man is towards polygamy, and of woman towards monogamy.'

'I deny the first statement,' said the Good Stockbroker heatedly. He was always heated where questions of morality were concerned, and was proceeding to give chapter and verse for what promised to become a somewhat dull discussion when the Bluestocking firmly interposed in her small staccato pipe:

'To hear you, one would suppose monogamic marriage was a divine inst.i.tution.'

'Absurd, isn't it?' grinned the Weary Roue. The Good Stockbroker looked pained and cleared his throat. At this formidable signal, the Family Egotist--whose irritation had been increasing like the alleged circulation of a newspaper--showed every sign of hurling the boomerang of his opinion into the fray. This would have meant the death of all liveliness for some hours to come, and a general sigh had begun to heave, when once more our brave Bluestocking stemmed the tide.

'You make rather a cult of the Bible,' she quacked scornfully, directing her remarks princ.i.p.ally at the Good Stockbroker; 'but you don't seem very conversant with the Old Testament. You will find there ample proof that monogamic marriage is no more divine than--than polygamy or free love. Nor has it any celestial origin, since it varies with race and climate. It is simply an indispensable social safeguard.'

'I'll have a shilling each way on it,' murmured the a.s.s (an incorrigible youth, quite the Winston Churchill of our family cabinet), using his customary formula. Unheeding, the Bluestocking chirruped on severely: 'You must know, if you have ever studied sociology, that marriage is essentially a _social contract_, primarily based on selfishness. At present it still retains its semi-barbarous form, and those who preach without reason of its alleged sacredness would be better employed in suggesting how the savage code now in vogue can be modified to meet the necessities of modern civilisation.'

She paused for breath. The Good Stockbroker was pale, but faced her manfully. 'Well done, Bluestocking!' said the Weary Roue. 'Wonderful woman, our Quacker,' said the a.s.s, 'I'll have a shilling each way on her.' The Wicked Stockbroker took a second helping of salad, and ate on unheeding, whilst the Gentle Lady at the head of the table anxiously watched the Family Egotist, who looked apoplectic and was toying truculently with a winegla.s.s with evident danger of shortening its career of usefulness.

'I was taught,' said the Good Stockbroker slowly, 'to regard marriage as a sacred inst.i.tution--a holy mystery.'

'Then you were taught rot,' snapped the Bluestocking, thus living up to the worst traditions of the polite dinner-table, and quivering with intellectual fury.

'Recrimination--' began the Good Stockbroker.

('Good word that, I'll have a shilling each way on it,' murmured the a.s.s.)

'--is not argument,' continued the Good Stockbroker.

'It may not be, but what you said was _rot_,' replied the Bluestocking, '"a holy mystery, inst.i.tuted in the time of man's innocency"--I recognise the quotation! And when was that time, pray? Are you referring to the Garden of Eden, or to what part of the Bible? The chosen people, the Hebrews, were polygamists from the time of Lamech, evidently with the approval of the Deity. Even the immaculate David had thirteen wives, and the saintly Solomon a clear thousand. Not much of a holy mystery in those days, eh?'

'Dear Bluestocking, you really _are_--' murmured the Gentle Lady.

'Not at all; she's perfectly sound,' interposed the Weary Roue, gloating with ghoulish joy over the Good Stockbroker's apparent discomfort.

'I give in,' said the latter, and a yell of joy burst from the a.s.s and the Weary Roue. 'I really cannot argue against a lady of such overwhelming eloquence,' he continued, bowing in his delightful courtly way. 'All the same, I shall always believe that marriage is a holy inst.i.tution.'

'My dear old chap,' said the Weary Roue, hastily, with one eye on the Family Egotist, who was certainly being treated badly that evening: 'your high-mindedness is admirable, quite admirable, but it won't work; it doesn't fit into modern conditions. Theoretically, Marriage is a Holy Mystery no doubt--in practice it's apt to be an Unholy Muddle, sometimes a Mess. Personally I believe in polygamy.'