14. The Decline of Marriage

Men don't marry nowadays. So everybody tells us. And I suppose we may
therefore conclude, by a simple act of inference, that women in turn
don't marry either. It takes two, of course, to make a quarrel--or a
marriage.

Why is this? "Young people nowadays want to begin where their fathers
left off." "Men are made so comfortable at present in their clubs."
"College-bred girls have no taste for housekeeping." "Rents are so high
and manners so luxurious." Good heavens, what silly trash, what puerile
nonsense! Are we all little boys and girls, I ask you, that we are to
put one another off with such transparent humbug? Here we have to deal
with a primitive instinct--the profoundest and deepest-seated instinct
of humanity, save only the instincts of food and drink and of
self-preservation. Man, like all other animals, has two main functions:
to feed his own organism, and to reproduce his species. Ancestral habit
leads him, when mature, to choose himself a mate--because he loves her.
It drives him, it urges him, it goads him irresistibly. If this profound
impulse is really lacking to-day in any large part of our race, there
must be some correspondingly profound and adequate reason for it. Don't
let us deceive ourselves with shallow platitudes which may do for
drawing-rooms. This is philosophy, even though post-prandial. Let us try
to take a philosophic view of the question at issue, from the point of
vantage of a biological outlook.

Before you begin to investigate the causes of a phenomenon _quelconque_,
'tis well to decide whether the phenomenon itself is there to
investigate.

Taking society throughout--_not_ in the sense of those "forty families"
to which the term is restricted by Lady Charles Beresford--I doubt
whether marriage is much out of fashion. Statistics show a certain
decrease, it is true, but not an alarming one. Among the labouring
classes, I imagine men, and also women, still wed pretty frequently.
When people say, "Young men won't marry nowadays," they mean young men
in a particular stratum of society, roughly bounded by a silk hat on
Sundays. Now, when you and I were young (I take it for granted that you
and I are approaching the fifties) young men did marry; even within this
restricted area, 'twas their wholesome way in life to form an attachment
early with some nice girl in their own set, and to start at least with
the idea of marrying her. Toward that goal they worked; for that end
they endured and sacrificed many things. True, even then, the long
engagement was the rule; but the long engagement itself meant some
persistent impulse, some strong impetus marriage-wards. The desire of
the man to make this woman his own, the