When elementary needs have been satisfied, the
serious happiness of most men depends upon two
things: their work, and their human relations. In the
world that we have been picturing, work will be free,
not excessive, full of the interest that belongs to a
collective enterprise in which there is rapid progress,
with something of the delight of creation even for
the humblest unit. And in human relations the gain
will be just as great as in work. The only human
relations that have value are those that are rooted in
mutual freedom, where there is no domination and no
slavery, no tie except affection, no economic or
conventional necessity to preserve the external show when
the inner life is dead. One of the most horrible
things about commercialism is the way in which it
poisons the relations of men and women. The evils of
prostitution are generally recognized, but, great as
they are, the effect of economic conditions on marriage
seems to me even worse. There is not infrequently,
in marriage, a suggestion of purchase, of acquiring
a woman on condition of keeping her in a certain
standard of material comfort. Often and often, a
marriage hardly differs from prostitution except by
being harder to escape from. The whole basis of
these evils is economic. Economic causes make marriage
a matter of bargain and contract, in which
affection is quite secondary, and its absence constitutes
no recognized reason for liberation. Marriage
should be a free, spontaneous meeting of mutual
instinct, filled with happiness not unmixed with a
feeling akin to awe: it should involve that degree of
respect of each for the other that makes even the
most trifling interference with liberty an utter
impossibility, and a common life enforced by one against
the will of the other an unthinkable thing of deep
horror. It is not so that marriage is conceived by
lawyers who make settlements, or by priests who give
the name of ``sacrament'' to an institution which pretends
to find something sanctifiable in the brutal lusts
or drunken cruelties of a legal husband. It is not in
a spirit of freedom that marriage is conceived by
most men and women at present: the law makes it an
opportunity for indulgence of the desire to interfere,
where each submits to some loss of his or her own liberty,
for the pleasure of curtailing the liberty of the
other. And the atmosphere of private property
makes it more difficult than it otherwise would be for
any better ideal to take root.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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