This very tentative argument, then, is not directed against marriage. I am not even ready to plead--that would be Utopian--that the relations of the sexes be withdrawn from social control. Our first step, at least in America, must be an attempt to sanitate marriage. This can be done--if it can be done at all--by relating marriage and its practice to certain notions of good and decency and honor that already have a tenure, however feeble, upon the public consciousness. Marriage, in brief, should be held to be created by love and sustained by love. I shall, of course, be accused of meaning passion. I mean that precise blending of passion and spiritual harmony and solid friendship without which, as even those who will not admit it know, the close association of a man and a woman is as disgusting as it is degrading. And marriage should be dependent, though this matter is included in the first, on good behavior. I will not keep a man or a woman as my friend whom I discover to be a liar, slanderer, thief. Much less ought one to keep such a person as husband or wife. Who is to judge, it will be asked? No objective judgment is needed. A subjective conviction of this sort suffices to reduce the union in question to dust and ashes. Here is the one practical point; here the one possibility of hope. To frame a rational theory of the relations of men and women is easy and agreeable. The very fashioners of such theories, being human, will be brought, under the discomforts of social pressure, to _seem_ to assent to all that their minds most passionately deny. A man or a woman of the highest philosophic insight will struggle through the ignominy of the divorce courts not so much in order to dissolve a meaningless legal bond as to save some one whom he or she loves and reveres from the criticism of the vulgar. For we live in a vulgar world. There is no safe and ultimate escape; its vulgarity in precisely these matters will often affront us where we least expected it. To mitigate that vulgarity must be our first task. I do not know whether it can be done at all. But if so, then it must be done by making an unhappy union disgraceful. People who are always bickering with each other, who are obviously unhappy in each other’s presence, who always hold opinions acridly opposed, who are always trying either subtly or obviously to escape from each other--such couples must fall under social disapproval. And this disapproval must apply even though one of the two prefers possessiveness to either happiness or decency or self-respect. Similarly those who are deliberately unfaithful should be disgraced--not for the act of unfaith but for the hypocrisy of remaining in a union which that very act, which the temptation to that very act, shows to have lost its purpose and its meaning.