Author's Preface - Page 2

when a joint domestic establishment,
involving questions of children or property, is contemplated,
marriage is in effect compulsory upon all normal people; and until
the law is altered there is nothing for us but to make the best of
it as it stands. Even when no such establishment is desired,
clandestine irregularities are negligible as an alternative to
marriage. How common they are nobody knows; for in spite of the
powerful protection afforded to the parties by the law of libel,
and the readiness of society on various other grounds to be
hoodwinked by the keeping up of the very thinnest appearances,
most of them are probably never suspected. But they are neither
dignified nor safe and comfortable, which at once rules them out
for normal decent people. Marriage remains practically inevitable;
and the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we shall set to
work to make it decent and reasonable.

WHAT DOES THE WORD MARRIAGE MEAN

However much we may all suffer through marriage, most of us think
so little about it that we regard it as a fixed part of the order
of nature, like gravitation. Except for this error, which may be
regarded as constant, we use the word with reckless looseness,
meaning a dozen different things by it, and yet always assuming
that to a respectable man it can have only one meaning. The pious
citizen, suspecting the Socialist (for example) of unmentionable
things, and asking him heatedly whether he wishes to abolish
marriage, is infuriated by a sense of unanswerable quibbling when
the Socialist asks him what particular variety of marriage he
means: English civil marriage, sacramental marriage, indissoluble
Roman Catholic marriage, marriage of divorced persons, Scotch
marriage, Irish marriage, French, German, Turkish, or South
Dakotan marriage. In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized
countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties
wish it, without any question of conduct. That is what marriage
means in Sweden. In Clapham that is what they call by the
senseless name of Free Love. In the British Empire we have
unlimited Kulin polygamy, Muslim polygamy limited to four wives,
child marriages, and, nearer home, marriages of first cousins: all
of them abominations in the eyes of many worthy persons. Not only
may the respectable British champion of marriage mean any of these
widely different institutions; sometimes he does not mean marriage
at all. He means monogamy, chastity, temperance, respectability,
morality, Christianity, anti-socialism, and a dozen other things
that have no necessary connection with marriage. He often means
something that he dare not avow: ownership of the person of
another human being, for instance. And he never tells the truth