When this fundamental fact is borne in mind, it becomes at once apparent that marriage will gain in dignity through the abolition of all legal sanction upon the personal claims that it involves. In a community which had renounced all claim to prescribe legally the nature of the marriage-bond, its duration, and the manner of its observance, there would be no washing of soiled domestic linen in the squalid publicity of courtrooms and newspaper-columns; no arbitration of noisy domestic differences by judges whose only qualification for the office is that they have had enough political influence to get themselves elected; none of the demoralizing consequences that the sense of proprietorship in one another has on the dispositions of married people. Marriage might still be publicly registered; it would no longer be publicly regulated. Its regulation would be left to the people whom it concerned, as it properly should be and safely could be; for as Mill remarked, “the modern conviction, the fruit of a thousand years experience, is that things in which the individual is the person directly interested, never go right but as they are left to his own discretion, and that any regulation of them by authority, save to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous.” The only way to protect married people against the bad faith which one may show toward the other, is to leave the door wide open for either of them to be quit of the union the minute it ceases to be satisfactory. If society for any reason sees fit to close the door to freedom, it sets union by law above the union by affection on which alone true marriage is based; and in so doing it is responsible for an amount of injustice, spiritual conflict, and suffering which no attempt at equitable regulation can ever compensate. Such attempts are in reality mere efforts to adjust the marriage-relation to the fundamental injustice of the marriage-law.