A reciprocal restraint on the part of the husband is clearly of no
importance whatever, so far as the first end of matrimony goes, the
protection of the community from inferior births. It is no wrong to
the State. But it does carry with it a variable amount of emotional
offence to the wife; it may wound her pride and cause her violent
perturbations of jealousy; it may lead to her neglect, her solitude
and unhappiness, and it may even work to her physical injury. There
should be an implication that it is not to occur. She has bound
herself to the man for the good of the State, and clearly it is
reasonable that she should look to the State for relief if it does
occur. The extent of the offence given her is the exact measure
of her injury; if she does not mind nobody minds, and if her
self-respect does not suffer nothing whatever is lost to the world;
and so it should rest with her to establish his misconduct, and, if
she thinks fit, to terminate the marriage.
A failure on either side to perform the elementary duties of
companionship, desertion, for example, should obviously give the
other mate the right to relief, and clearly the development of any
disqualifying habit, drunkenness, or drug-taking, or the like, or
any serious crime or acts of violence, should give grounds for a
final release. Moreover, the modern Utopian State intervenes between
the sexes only because of the coming generation, and for it to
sustain restrictions upon conduct in a continually fruitless
marriage is obviously to lapse into purely moral intervention. It
seems reasonable, therefore, to set a term to a marriage that
remains childless, to let it expire at the end of three or four or
five unfruitful years, but with no restriction upon the right of
the husband and wife to marry each other again.
These are the fairly easy primaries of this question. We now come to
the more difficult issues of the matter. The first of these is the
question of the economic relationships of husband and wife, having
regard to the fact that even in Utopia women, at least until they
become mothers, are likely to be on the average poorer than men. The
second is the question of the duration of a marriage. But the two
interlock, and are, perhaps, best treated together in one common
section. And they both ramify in the most complicated manner into
the consideration of the general morale of the community.
Section 5
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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