189:—
Even love is sold.
Not even the intercourse of the sexes is exempt from the despotism of
positive institution. Law pretends even to govern the indisciplinable
wanderings of passion, to put fetters on the clearest deductions of
reason, and, by appeals to the will, to subdue the involuntary
affections of our nature. Love is inevitably consequent upon the
perception of loveliness. Love withers under constraint: its very
essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy,
nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its
votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve.
How long then ought the sexual connection to last? what law ought to
specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its duration? A
husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each
other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment
after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny,
and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation of the
right of private judgement should that law be considered which should
make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in spite of the caprices, the
inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity for improvement of the human
mind. And by so much would the fetters of love be heavier and more
unendurable than those of friendship, as love is more vehement and
capricious, more dependent on those delicate peculiarities of
imagination, and less capable of reduction to the ostensible merits of
the object.
The state of society in which we exist is a mixture of feudal savageness
and imperfect civilization. The narrow and unenlightened morality of the
Christian religion is an aggravation of these evils. It is not even
until lately that mankind have admitted that happiness is the sole end
of the science of ethics, as of all other sciences; and that the
fanatical idea of mortifying the flesh for the love of God has been
discarded. I have heard, indeed, an ignorant collegian adduce, in favour
of Christianity, its hostility to every worldly feeling! (The first
Christian emperor made a law by which seduction was punished with death;
if the female pleaded her own consent, she also was punished with death;
if the parents endeavoured to screen the criminals, they were banished
and their estates were confiscated; the slaves who might be accessory
were burned alive, or forced to swallow melted lead. The very offspring
of an illegal love were involved in the consequences of the
sentence.—Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall”, etc., volume 2, page 210. See
also, for the hatred of the primitive Christians to love and even
marriage, page 269.)
But if happiness be the object of morality, of all human unions and
disunions; if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the
quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce, then the
connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes to the
comfort of the parties, and is naturally dissolved when its evils are
greater than its benefits. There is nothing immoral in this separation.
Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure
it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion
as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its
indiscreet choice. Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same
woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such
a vow, in both cases, excludes us from all inquiry. The language of the
votarist is this: The woman I now love may be infinitely inferior to
many others; the creed I now profess may be a mass of errors and
absurdities; but I exclude myself from all future information as to the
amiability of the one and the truth of the other, resolving blindly, and
in spite of conviction, to adhere to them. Is this the language of
delicacy and reason? Is the love of such a frigid heart of more worth
than its belief?
The present system of constraint does no more, in the majority of
instances, than make hypocrites or open enemies. Persons of delicacy and
virtue, unhappily united to one whom they find it impossible to love,
spend the loveliest season of their life in unproductive efforts to
appear otherwise than they are, for the sake of the feelings of their
partner or the welfare of their mutual offspring: those of less
generosity and refinement openly avow their disappointment, and linger
out the remnant of that union, which only death can dissolve, in a state
of incurable bickering and hostility. The early education of their
children takes its colour from the squabbles of the parents; they are
nursed in a systematic school of ill-humour, violence, and falsehood.
Had they been suffered to part at the moment when indifference rendered
their union irksome, they would have been spared many years of misery:
they would have connected themselves more suitably, and would have found
that happiness in the society of more congenial partners which is for
ever denied them by the despotism of marriage. They would have been
separately useful and happy members of society, who, whilst united, were
miserable and rendered misanthropical by misery. The conviction that
wedlock is indissoluble holds out the strongest of all temptations to
the perverse: they indulge without restraint in acrimony, and all the
little tyrannies of domestic life, when they know that their victim is
without appeal. If this connection were put on a rational basis, each
would be assured that habitual ill-temper would terminate in separation,
and would check this vicious and dangerous propensity.
Prostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage and its
accompanying errors. Women, for no other crime than having followed the
dictates of a natural appetite, are driven with fury from the comforts
and sympathies of society. It is less venial than murder; and the
punishment which is inflicted on her who destroys her child to escape
reproach is lighter than the life of agony and disease to which the
prostitute is irrecoverably doomed. Has a woman obeyed the impulse of
unerring nature;—society declares war against her, pitiless and eternal
war: she must be the tame slave, she must make no reprisals; theirs is
the right of persecution, hers the duty of endurance. She lives a life
of infamy: the loud and bitter laugh of scorn scares her from all
return. She dies of long and lingering disease: yet SHE is in fault, SHE
is the criminal, SHE the froward and untamable child,—and society,
forsooth, the pure and virtuous matron, who casts her as an abortion
from her undefiled bosom! Society avenges herself on the criminals of
her own creation; she is employed in anathematizing the vice to-day,
which yesterday she was the most zealous to teach. Thus is formed
one-tenth of the population of London: meanwhile the evil is twofold.
Young men, excluded by the fanatical idea of chastity from the society
of modest and accomplished women, associate with these vicious and
miserable beings, destroying thereby all those exquisite and delicate
sensibilities whose existence cold-hearted worldlings have denied;
annihilating all genuine passion, and debasing that to a selfish feeling
which is the excess of generosity and devotedness. Their body and mind
alike crumble into a hideous wreck of humanity; idiocy and disease
become perpetuated in their miserable offspring, and distant generations
suffer for the bigoted morality of their forefathers. Chastity is a
monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural
temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root
of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race
to misery, that some few may monopolize according to law. A system could
not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness
than marriage.
I conceive that from the abolition of marriage, the fit and natural
arrangement of sexual connection would result. I by no means assert that
the intercourse would be promiscuous: on the contrary, it appears, from
the relation of parent to child, that this union is generally of long
duration, and marked above all others with generosity and self-devotion.
But this is a subject which it is perhaps premature to discuss. That
which will result from the abolition of marriage will be natural and
right; because choice and change will be exempted from restraint.
In fact, religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical
code of misery and servitude: the genius of human happiness must tear
every leaf from the accursed book of God ere man can read the
inscription on his heart. How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays
and finery, start from her own disgusting image should she look in the
mirror of nature!—