 Chapter 1 With Introductory Note The earliest part of this book appeared in the form of five articles which came out in the new witness, at the crisis of the recent controversy in the press on the subject of divorce. Crude and sketchy as they confessedly were, they had a certain rude plan of their own, which I find very difficult to recast even in order to expand. I have therefore decided to reprint the original articles as they stood, save for a few introductory words, and then at the risk of repetition, to add a few further chapters, explaining more fully any conceptions that may seem to have been too crudely assumed or dismissed. I have set forth the original matter as it appeared under a general heading without dividing it into chapters. Chapter 1 The Superstition of Divorce It is futile to talk of reform without reference to form. To take a case from my own tastes and fancy, there is nothing I feel to be so beautiful and wonderful as a window. All casements are magic casements, whether they open on the foam or the front garden. They lie close to the ultimate mystery and paradox of limitation and liberty. But if I followed my instincts toward an infinite number of windows, it would end in having no walls. It would also, it may be added incidentally, end in having no windows either, or a window makes a picture by making a picture frame. But there is a simpler way of stating my more simple and fatal error. It is that I have wanted a window without considering whether I wanted a house. Now many appeals are being made to us today on behalf of that light and liberty that might well be symbolized by windows, especially as so many of them concern the enlightenment and liberation of the house in the sense of the home. Many quite disinterested people urge many quite reasonable considerations in the case of divorce as a type of domestic liberation. But in the journalistic and general discussion of the matter, there is far too much of the mind that works backwards and at random, in the manner of all windows and no walls. Much people say they want divorce without asking themselves whether they want marriage. Even in order to be divorced, it has generally been found necessary to go through the preliminary formality of being married, and unless the nature of this initial act be considered, we might as well be considering haircutting for the bald or spectacles for the blind. To be divorced is to be in the literal sense unmarried, and there is no sense in the thing being undone when we do not know if it is done. There is perhaps no worse advice, nine times out of ten, than the advice to do the work that's nearest. It is especially bad when it means, as it generally does, removing the obstacle that's nearest. It means that men are not to behave like men but like mice, who nibble at the thing that's nearest. The man, like the mouse, undermines what he cannot understand. As he himself bumps into a thing, he calls it the nearest obstacle, though the obstacle may happen to be the pillar that holds up the whole roof over his head. He industriously removes the obstacle, and in return the obstacle removes him, and much more valuable things than he. This opportunism is perhaps the most unpractical thing in this highly unpractical world. People talk vaguely against destructive criticism, but what is the matter with this criticism is not that it destroys, but that it does not criticize. It is destruction without design. It is taking a complex machine to pieces bit by bit in any order without even knowing what the machine is for, and if a man deals with a deadly dynamic machine on the principle of touching the knob that's nearest, he will find out the defects of that cherry philosophy. Now leaving many sincere and serious critics of modern marriage on one side for the moment, great masses of modern men and women who write and talk about marriage are thus nibbling blindly at it like an army of mice. When the Reformers propose, for instance, that divorce should be obtainable after an absence of three years, the absence actually taken for granted in the first military arrangements of the late European War, their readers and supporters could seldom give any sort of logical reason for the period being three years and not three months or three minutes. They are like people who should say, give me three feet of dog and not care where the cut came. Such persons fail to see a dog as an organic entity. In other words, they cannot make head or tail of it. The chief thing to say about such Reformers of marriage is that they cannot make head or tail of it. They do not know what it is, or what it is meant to be, or what its supporters suppose it to be. They never look at it, even when they are inside it. They do the work that's nearest, which is poking holes in the bottom of a boat under the impression that they are digging in a garden. This question of what a thing is and whether it is a garden or a boat appears to them abstract and academic. They have no notion of how large is the idea they attack or how relatively small appear the holes that they pick in it. Thus, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an intelligent man in other matter, says that there is only a theological opposition to divorce and that it is entirely founded on certain texts in the Bible about marriages. This is exactly as if he had said that a belief in the brotherhood of men was only founded on certain texts in the Bible about all men being the children of Adam and Eve. Millions of peasants and plain people all over the world assume marriage to be static without having ever clapped eyes on any text. Numbers of more modern people, especially after the recent experiments in America, think divorce is a social disease without having ever bothered about any text. It may be maintained that even in these or in any one the idea of marriage is ultimately mystical, and the same may be maintained about the idea of brotherhood. It is obvious that a husband and wife are not visibly one flesh in the sense of being one quadruped. It is equally obvious that Pateruski and Jack Johnson are not twins and probably have not played together at their mother's knee. There is indeed a very important admission or addition to be realized here. What is true is this, that if the nonsense of Nichi or some such sophist submerged current culture, so that it was the fashion to deny the duties of fraternity, then indeed it might be found that the group which still affirmed fraternity was the original group in whose sacred books was the text about Adam and Eve. Suppose some Prussian professor has opportunally discovered that Germans and lesser men are respectively descended from two such very different monkeys that they are in no sense brothers, but barely cousins, German, any number of times removed. And suppose he proceeds to remove them even further with a hatchet. Suppose he bases on this a repetition of the conduct of Cain, saying, not so much, I am my brother's keeper, as is he really my brother. And suppose this higher philosophy of the hatchet becomes prevalent in colleges and cultivated circles, as even more foolish philosophies have done. Then I agree it probably will be the Christian, the man who preserves the text about Cain, who will continue to assert that he is still the professor's brother and that he is still the professor's keeper. He may possibly add that, in his opinion, the professor seems to require a keeper. And that is doubtless the situation in the controversies about divorce and marriage today. It is the Christian church which continues to hold strongly when the world for some reason has weakened on it, what many others hold at other times. But even then it is barely picking up the shreds and scraps of the subject to talk about a reliance on texts. The vital point in the comparison is this. That human brotherhood means a whole view of life, held in the light of life and defended rightly or wrongly by constant appeals to every aspect of life. The religion that holds it most strongly will hold it when nobody else holds it, that is quite true, and that some of us may be so perverse as to think a point in favor of the religion. But anybody who holds it at all, will hold it as a philosophy, not hung on one text, but on a hundred truths. Fraternity may be a sentimental metaphor. I may be suffering a delusion when I hail a Montagrin pissed as my long lost brother. As a fact I have my own suspicion about which of us is that got lost. But my delusion is not a deduction from one text or from twenty. It is the expression of a relation that to me at least seems a reality. And what I should say about the idea of a brother, I should say about the idea of a wife. It is supposed to be very unbusinesslike to begin at the beginning. It is called abstract and academic, principles with which English, etc., etc. It is still in some strange way considered unpractical to open up inquiries about anything by asking what it is. I happen to have, however, a fairly complete contempt for that sort of practicality, for I know that it is not even practical. My ideal businessman would not be one who planked down fifty pounds and said, Here's hard cash. I am a plain man, but it is quite indifferent to me whether I am paying a debt or giving alms to a beggar or buying a wild bull or a bathing machine. Despite the infectious heartiness of his tone, I should still, in considering the hard cash, say, like a cab man, what's this? I should continue to insist prigishly that it was highly practical point, what the money was, what it was supposed to stand for, to aim at, or declare. What was the nature of the transaction, or in short, what the devil is the man supposed he was doing? I shall therefore begin by asking, in an equally mystical manner, what in the name of God and the angels a man getting married supposed he is doing. I shall begin by asking what marriage is, and the mere question will probably reveal that the act itself, good or bad, wise or foolish, is of a certain kind, that it is not an inquiry or an experiment or an accident. It may probably dawn on us that it is a promise. It can be more fully defined by saying it is a vow. Many will immediately answer that it is a rash vow. I am content for the moment to reply that all vows are rash vows. I am not now defending, but defining vows. I am pointing out that this is a discussion about vows, first of whether they are ought to be vows, and second of what vows ought to be. Aught a man to break a promise, ought a man to make a promise. These are philosophical questions, but the philosophic peculiarity of divorce and remarriage, as compared with free love and no marriage, is that a man breaks and makes a promise at the same moment. It is a highly Germanic philosophy, and recalls the way in which the enemy wishes to celebrate his successful destruction of all treaties by signing some more. If I were breaking a promise, I would do it without promises. But I am very far from minimizing the momentous and disputable nature of the vow itself. I shall try to show in a further article that this rash and romantic operation uses the only furnace from which can come the plain hardware of humanity, the cast iron resistance of citizenship, or the cold steel of common sense. But I am not denying that the furnace is a fire. The vow is a violent and unique thing, though there have been many besides the marriage vow, vows of chivalry, vows of poverty, vows of celibacy, pagan as well as Christian. But modern fashion has rather fallen out of the habit, and men miss the type for the lack of the parallels. The shortest way of putting the problem is to ask whether being free includes being free to bind oneself, for the vow is a trist with oneself. I may be misunderstood, if I say, for brevity, that marriage is an affair of honor. The skeptic will be delighted to assent by saying it is a fight, and so it is if only with oneself. But the point here is that it necessarily has the touch of the heroic, in which virtue can be translated by virtuous. Now about fighting in nature, there is an implied infinity, or at least potential infinity. I mean that loyalty in war is loyalty in defeat, or even disgrace. It is due to the flag precisely at the moment when the flag nearly falls. We do already apply this to the flag of the nation, and the question is whether it is wise or unwise to apply it to the flag of the family. Of course it is tenable that we should apply it to neither, that misgovernment in the nation or misery in the citizen would make the desertion of the flag an act of reason and not treason. I will only say here that if this were really the limit of national loyalty, some of us would have deserted our nation long ago. CHAPTER II. THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE II. To the two or three articles appearing here on this subject, I have given the title of the superstition of divorce, and the title is not taken at random. While free love seems to me a heresy, divorce does really seem to me a superstition. It is not only more of a superstition than free love, but much more of a superstition than strict sacramental marriage, and this point can hardly be made to plain. It is the partisans of divorce, not the defenders of marriage, who attach a stiff and senseless sanctity to a mere ceremony, apart from the meaning of the ceremony. It is our opponents and not we who hope to be saved by the letter of ritual instead of the spirit of reality. It is they who hold that vow or violation, loyalty or disloyalty, can all be disposed of by a mysterious and magic rite performed first in a law court and then in a church or registry office. There is little difference between the two parts of the ritual, except that the law court is much more ritualistic. But the plainest parallels will show anybody that all this is sheer barbarous cadulity. It may or may not be superstition for a man to believe he must kiss the Bible to show he is telling the truth. It is certainly the most groveling superstition for him to believe that if he kisses the Bible anything he says will come true. It would surely be the blackest and most benighted Bible worship to suggest that the mere kiss on the mere book alters the moral quality of perjury. Yet this is precisely what is implied in saying that formal remarriage alters the moral quality of conjugial infidelity. It may have been a mark of the dark ages that Harold should swear on a relic though he were afterwards foresworn, but surely those ages would have been at their darkest if he had been content to be sworn on a relic and foresworn on another relic. Yet this is the new altar those Reformers would erect for us out of the moldy and meaningless relics of their dead laws and their dying religion. Now we at any rate are talking about an idea, a thing of the intellect and the soul, which we feel to be unalterable by legal antics. We are talking about the idea of loyalty, perhaps a fantastic, perhaps only an unfashionable idea, but one we can explain and defend as an idea. Now I have already pointed out that most sane men do admit our ideal in such a case as patriotism or public spirit, the necessity of saving the state to which we belong. The patriot may revile, but must not renounce his country. He must curse it to cure it, but not to wither it up. The old pagan citizens felt thus about the city, and modern nationalists feel thus about the nation. But even mere modern internationalists feel it about something if it is only the nation of mankind. Even the humanitarian does not become a misanthrope and live in a monkey-house. Even a disappointed collectivist or communist does not retire into the exclusive society of beavers, because beavers are all communists of the most class-conscious solidarity. He admits the necessity of clinging to his fellow-creatures and begging them to abandon the use of the possessive pronoun, heartbreaking as his efforts must seem to him after a lifetime. Even a pacifist does not prefer rats to men, on the ground that the rat community is so pure from the taint of jingoism as always to leave the sinking ship. In short, everybody recognizes that there is some ship, large and small, which he ought not to leave, even when he thinks it is sinking. We may take it then that there are institutions to which we are attached finally, just as there are others to which we are attached temporarily. We go from shop to shop trying to get what we want, but we do not go from nation to nation doing this, unless we belong to a certain group now heading very straight for pogroms. In the first case it is the threat that we shall withdraw our custom, in the second it is the threat that we shall never withdraw ourselves that we shall be part of the institution to the last. The time when the shop loses its customers is the time when the city needs its citizens, but it needs them as critics who will always remain to criticize. I need not now emphasize the deadly need of this double energy of internal reform and external defense. The whole towering tragedy which has eclipsed our earth in our time is but one terrific illustration of it. The hammer-strokes are coming thick and fast now and filling the world with infernal thunders, and there is still the iron sound of something unbreakable, deeper and louder than all the things that break. We may curse the kings, we may distrust the captains, we may murmur at the very existence of the armies, but we know that in the darkest days that may come to us no man will desert the flag. Now when we pass from loyalty to the nation, to loyalty to the family, there can be no doubt about the first and plainest difference. The difference is that the family is a thing far more free. The vow is a voluntary loyalty, and the marriage vow is marked among ordinary oaths of allegiance by the fact that the allegiance is also a choice. The man is not only a citizen of the city, but also the founder and builder of the city. He is not only a soldier serving the colors, but he has himself artistically selected and combined the colors, like the colors of an individual dress. If it be admissible to ask him to be true to the commonwealth that has made him, it is at least not more illiberal to ask him to be true to the commonwealth he himself has made. If civic fidelity be, as it is, a necessity, it is also, in a special sense, a constraint. The old joke against patriotism, the Gilbertean irony, congratulated the Englishman on his fine and fastidious taste in being born in England. It made a plausible point in saying, for he might have been a Russian, though indeed we have liked to see some persons who seem to think that they could be Russians, when the fancy took them. Most common sense considers, even such involuntary loyalty, natural. We can hardly wonder if it thinks voluntary loyalty still more natural. And the small state founded on the sexes is at once the most voluntary and most natural of all self-governing states. It is not true of Mr. Brown that he might have been a Russian, but it may be true of Mrs. Brown that she might have been a Robinson. Now it is not at all hard to see why this small community, so specially freed touching its cause, should yet be specially bound touching its effects. It is not hard to see why the vow made most freely is the vow kept most firmly. There are attached to it by the nature of things, consequences, so tremendous that no contract can offer any comparison. There is no contract unless it be what is said to be signed in blood, that can call spirits from the vastly deep or being cherubs or goblins to inhabit a small modern villa. There is no stroke of the pen which creates real bodies and souls or makes the characters in a novel come to life. The institution that puzzles intellectuals so much can be explained by the mere material fact, perceptible even to intellectuals, that children are, generally speaking, younger than their parents. No death to us part is not an irrational formula, for those will almost certainly die before they see more than half of the amazing or alarming thing they have done. Such is, and occurred and crude outline, this obvious thing for those to whom it is not obvious. Now I know there are thinking men among those who would tamper with it, and I shall expect some of these to reply to my questions. But for the moment I only ask this question. Under the parliamentary and journalistic divorce movement, shows even a shadowy trace of these fundamental truths regarded as tests. Does it even discuss the nature of a vow, the limits and objects of loyalty, the survival of the family as a small and free state? The writers are content to say that Mr. Brown is uncomfortable with Mrs. Brown and the last emancipation, for separated couples seems only to mean that he is still uncomfortable without Mrs. Brown. These are not days in which being uncomfortable is felt as the final test of public action. For the rest, the reformer shows statistically that families are in fact so scattered in our industrial anarchy that they may as well abandon hope of finding their way home again. I am acquainted with that argument for making bad worse, and I see it everywhere leading to slavery. Because London Bridge is broken down, we must assume that bridges are not meant to bridge. Because London commercialism and capitalism have copied hell, we are to continue to copy them. Anyhow, some will retain the conviction that the ancient bridge built between the two towers of sex is the worthiest of the great works of the earth. It is exceedingly characteristic of the dreary decades before the war that the forms of freedom in which they seemed to specialize were suicide and divorce. I am not at the moment pronouncing on the moral problem of either. I am merely noting, as signs of those times, those two true or false counsels of despair, the end of life and the end of love. Other forms of freedom were being increasingly curtailed. Freedom indeed was the one thing that progressives and conservatives alike contemed. Socialists were largely concerned to prevent strikes by state arbitration, that is, by adding another rich man to give the casting vote between rich and poor. Even in claiming what they called the right to work, they tacitly surrender the right to leave off working. Tories were preaching conscription, not so much to defend the independence of England as to destroy the independence of Englishmen. Liberals, of course, were chiefly interested in eliminating liberty, especially touching beer and betting. It was wicked to fight, and unsafe, even to argue, for citing any certain and contemporary fact might land one in a libel action. As all these doors were successfully shut in our faces along the chilly and cheerless corridor of progress with its glazed tiles, the doors of death and divorce alone stood open, or rather opened wider and wider. I do not expect the exponents of divorce to admit any similarity in the two things, yet the passing parallel is not irrelevant. It may enable them to realize the limits within which our moral instincts can, even for the sake of argument, treat this desperate remedy as a normal object of desire. Divorce is for us at best a failure, of which we are more concerned to find the cure and cause than to complete the effects, and we regard a system that produces many divorces as we do a system that drives men to drown and shoot themselves. For instance, it is perhaps the commonest complaint against the existing law that the poor cannot afford to avail themselves of it. It is an argument to which normally I should listen with special sympathy, but while I should condemn the law of being a luxury, my first thought will naturally be that divorce and death are only luxuries in a rather rare sense. I should not primarily condole with the poor man on the high price of prussic acid, or on the fact that all precipices of suitable suicidal height were the private property of landlords. There are other high prices and high precipices I should attack first. I should admit in the abstract what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, that what is good for the rich is good for the poor. But my first and strongest impression would be that prussic acid sauce is not good for anybody. I fear I should on the impulse of the moment pull a clerk or an artisan back by the coattails if he were jumping over Shakespeare's cliff, even if Dover Sands were strewn with the remains of dukes and bankers who had already taken the plunge. But in one respect I will hardly concede the cult of divorce has differed from the mere cult of death. The cult of death is dead. Those I knew in my youth as young pessimists are now aged optimists, and what is more to the point at present, even when it was living it was limited. It was a thing of one click in one class. We know the rule in the old comedy that when the heroine went mad in white satin the confident went mad in white muslin. But when in some tragedy of the artistic temperament the painter committed suicide in velvet it was never implied that the plumber must commit suicide in corduroy. It was never held that Heta Walters' housemaid must die in torment on the carpet, trying as her term of service may have been, or that Mr. Tancere's butler must play the Roman fool and die on his own carving-knife. That particular form of playing the fool, Roman or otherwise, was an oligarchic privilege in the decadent epic, and even as such largely passed with that epic. Pessimism, which was never popular, is no longer even fashionable. A far different fate has awaited the other fashion, the other somewhat dismal form of freedom. If divorce is a disease it is no longer to be a fashionable disease like appendicitis, it is to be made an epidemic like smallpox. As we have already seen, papers and public men today make a vast parade of the necessity of setting the poor man free to get a divorce. Now why are they so mortally anxious that he should be free to get a divorce, and not in the least anxious that he should be free to get anything else? Why are the same people happy, they almost hilarious, when he gets a divorce, who are horrified when he gets a drink? What becomes of his money? What becomes of his children? Where he works, when he ceases to work, are less and less under his personal control. Labor exchanges, insurance cards, welfare work, and a hundred forms of police inspection and supervision have combined for good or evil to fix him more or more strictly to a certain place in society. He is less and less allowed to go look for a new job. Why is he allowed to go look for a new wife? He is more and more compelled to recognize a Muslim code about liquor. Why is it made so easy for him to escape from his old Christian code about sex? What is the meaning of this mysterious immunity, this special permit for adultery? And why is running away with his neighbor's wife to be the only exhilaration still left open to him? Why must he love as he pleases when he may not even live as he pleases? The answer is, I regret to say, that this social campaign in most, though by no means all of its most prominent campaigners, relies in this matter on a very smug and pestilent piece of chalk. There are some advocates of democratic divorce who are really advocates of general democratic freedom, but they are the exceptions. I might say, with all respect, that they are the dupes. The omnipresence of the thing in the press and the political society is due to a motive precisely opposite to the motive professed. The modern rulers, who are simply the rich men, are really quite consistent in their attitude to the poor man. It is the same spirit which takes away his children under the pretense of order which takes away his wife under the pretense of liberty. That which wishes, in the words of the comic song, to break up the happy home is primarily anxious not to break up the much more unhappy factory. Capitalism, of course, is at war with a family, for the same reason which has led its being at war with the trade union. This indeed is the only sense in which it is true that capitalism is connected with individualism. Capitalism believes in collectivism for itself and individualism for its enemies. It desires its victims to be individuals, or in other words to be atoms, for the word atom in its clearest meaning, which is none too clear, might be translated as individual. If there be any bond, if there be any brotherhood, if there be any class loyalty or domestic discipline by which the poor can help the poor, these emancipators will certainly strive to loosen that bond or lift that discipline in the most liberal fashion. If there be such a brotherhood, these individualists will redistribute it in the form of individuals, or in other words, smash it to atoms. The masters of modern plutocracy know what they are about. They are making no mistake. They can be clear to the slander of inconsistency. A very profound and precise instinct has led them to single out the human household as the chief obstacle to their inhuman progress. Without the family, we are helpless before the state, which in our modern case is the servile state. To use a military metaphor, the family is the only formation in which the charge of the rich can be repulsed. It is a force that forms twos as soldiers form fours, and in every peasant country has stood in the square house or the square plot of land as infantry have stood in squares against cavalry. How this force operates this and why, I'll try to explain in the last of these articles, but it is when it is most nearly ridden down by the horsemen of pride and privilege as in Poland or Ireland, when the battle grows most desperate and the hope most dark, that men begin to understand why that wild oath in its beginnings was flung beyond the bonds of the world, and what would seem as passing as a vision is made permanent as a vow. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE by G. K. Chesterton CHAPTER III THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE III There has long been a curiously consistent attempt to conceal the fact that France is a Christian country. There have been Frenchmen in the plot, no doubt, and no doubt there have been Frenchmen, though I have myself only found Englishmen, in the derivative attempt to conceal the fact that Balzac was a Christian writer. I began to read Balzac long after I read the admirers of Balzac, and they had never given me a hint of this truth. I had read that his books were bound in yellow and quite impudently French, though I may have been cloudy about why being French should be imputed in the Frenchmen. I had read the truer description of the grimy wizard of the comedy Humane, and have lived to learn the truth of it. Balzac certainly is a genius of the type of that artist he himself describes, who could draw a broomstick so that one knew it had swept the room after a murderer. The furniture of Balzac is more alive than the figures of many dramas. For this I was prepared, but not for a certain spiritual assumption which I regarded at once as a historical phenomena. The morality of a great writer is not the morality he teaches, but the morality he takes for granted. The Catholic type of Christian ethic runs through Balzac's book exactly as the Puritan type of Christian ethic runs through Bunyan's books. What his professed opinions were, I do not know, any more than I know Shakespeare's. But I know that both those great creators of a multitudinous world made it, as compared with other and later writers, on the same fundamental moral plan as the universe of Dante. There can be no doubt about it, for anyone who can apply as a test the truth I have mentioned, that the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain. But here and there Balzac does explain, and with that intellectual concentration Mr. George Moore has acutely observed in that novelist when he is a theorist. In the other day I found, in one of Balzac's novels, this passage, which, whether or no it would precisely hit Mr. George Moore's mood at the moment, strikes me as a perfect prophecy of this epic, and might also be a motto for this book. With the solidarity of the family, society has lost that elemental force which Montesquieu defined and called honor. Society has isolated its members the better to govern them, and has divided in order to weaken. Throughout our youth and the years before the war, the current criticism followed Ibsen in describing the domestic system as a doll's house, and the domestic woman as a doll. Mr. Bernard Shaw varied the metaphor by saying that the mere custom kept the woman in the home as it keeps the parrot in the cage, and the plays and tales of the period made vivid sketches of a woman who also resembled a parrot in other particulars. Rich in raiment, shrill in accent, and addicted to saying over and over again what she had been taught to say. Mr. Granville Barker, the spiritual child of Mr. Bernard Shaw, commented in his clever play of the voisey inheritance on tyranny, hypocrisy, and boredom as the constituent elements of a happy English home. Leaving the truth of this aside for the moment, it will be well to insist that the conventionality thus criticized would be even more characteristic of a happy French home. It is not the Englishman's house but the Frenchman's house that is his castle. It might be further added, touching the essential ethical view of the sexes at least, that the Irishman's house is his castle, though it has been for some centuries a besieged castle. Anyhow, those conventions which were remarked as making domesticity doll-narrow and unnaturally meek and submissive are particularly powerful among the Irish and the French. From this it will surely be easy, for any lucid and logical thinker, to deduce the fact that the French are dull and narrow and that the Irish are unnaturally meek and submissive. Mr. Bernard Shaw, being an Irishman who lives among Englishmen, may be conveniently taken as the type of the difference, and will no doubt be found that the political friends of Mr. Shaw, among Englishmen, will be of a wilder revolutionary type than those whom he would have found among Irishmen. We are in a position to compare the meekness of the Fenyans with the fury of the Fabians. This deadening monogamic ideal may even in a larger sense define and distinguish all the flat subserviency of Clare from all the flaming revolt of Clapham, nor need we now look far to understand why revolutions have been unknown in the history of France, or why they happen so persistently in the vaguer politics of England. This rigidity and respectability must surely be the explanation of all that incapacity for any civil experiment or explosion, which has always marked that sleepy hamlet of very private houses which we call the City of Paris. The same things are true not only of Parisians but of peasants. They are even true of other peasants in the Great Alliance. Students of Serbian traditions tell us that the peasant literature lays a special and singular curse on the violation of marriage, and this well may explain the prim and sheepish pacifism complained of in that people. In plain words, there is clearly something wrong in the calculation by which it was proved that a housewife must be as much a servant as a housemaid, or which exhibited the domesticated man as being as gentle as the primrose, or as conservative as the primrose league. It is precisely those who have been conservative about the family who have been revolutionary about the state. Those who are blamed for the bigotry or bourgeois smugness of their marriage conventions are actually those blamed for the restlessness and violence of their political reforms. Now is there seriously any difficulty in discovering the cause of this? It is simply that in such a society the government, in dealing with the family, deals with something almost as permanent and self-renewing as itself. There can be a continuous family policy, like a continuous foreign policy. In peasant countries the family fights. It may almost be said that the farm fights. I do not mean merely that it riots in evil and exceptional times, though this is not unimportant. It was a savage but a sane feature when in the Irish evictions the women poured hot water from the windows. It was a part of that final falling back on private tools as public weapons. That sort of thing is not only war to the knife, but almost war to the fork and spoon. It was in this grim sense, perhaps, that Parnell in that mysterious pun said that kettle was a household word in Ireland. It certainly ought to be after its subsequent glories. And in a more general sense it is certain that meddling with a housewife will ultimately mean getting into hot water. But it is not of such crises of bodily struggle that I speak, but of a steady and peaceful pressure from below of a thousand families upon the framework of government. For this a certain spirit of defense and enclosure is essential, and even feudalism was right in feeling that any such affair of honour must be a family affair. It was a true artistic instinct that pictured the pedigree on the code that protects the body. The free peasant has arms if he has not armorial bearings. He has not an esthetician, but he has a shield. Nor do I see why, in a freer and happier society than the present, or even the past, it should not be a blazing shield. For that is true of pedigree, which is true of property. The wrong is not in its being imposed on men, but rather in its being denied to them. Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists, and so aristocracy sins not in planting a family tree, but in not planting a family forest. Anyhow, it is found in practice that the domestic citizen can stand to siege, even by the state, because he has those who will stand by him through thick and thin, especially thin. Now those who hold that the state can be made fit to own all and administer all can consistently disregard this argument, but it may be said with all respect that the world is more and more disregarding them. If we could find a perfect machine and a perfect man to work it, it might be a good argument for state socialism, though an equally good argument for personal despotism. But most of us, I fancy, are now agreed that something of that social pressure from below, which we call freedom, is vital to the health of the state, and this it is which cannot be fully exercised by individuals, but only by groups and traditions. Such groups have been many, there have been many monasteries, there may be guilds, but there is only one type among them which all human beings have a spontaneous and omnipresent inspiration to build for themselves, and this type is the family. I had intended this article to be the last of those outlining the elements of this debate, but I shall have to add a short, concluding section, on the way in which all this is missed in the practical, or rather unpractical, proposals about divorce. Here I will only say that they suffer from the modern and morbid weaknesses of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal, as a fact the tyranny, hypocrisy, and boredom complained of are not domesticity, but the decay of domesticity. The case of that particular complaint in Mr. Granville Barker's play is itself a proof. The whole point of the voisey inheritance was that there was no voisey inheritance. The only heritage of that family was a highly dishonorable debt. Naturally their family affections had decayed when their whole ideal of property and property had decayed, and there was little love as well as little honor among thieves. It is yet to be proved that they would have been as much bored if they had had a positive and not a negative heritage, and had worked a farm instead of a fraud. And the experience of mankind points the other way. CHAPTER IV I have touched before now on a famous or infamous royalist who suggested that the people should eat grass, an unfortunate remark perhaps for a royalist to make, since the regimen is only recorded of a royal personage. But there was certainly a simplicity in the solution worthy of a sultan, or even a savage chief, and it is this touch of autocratic innocence on which I have mainly insisted, touching the social reforms of our day, and especially the social reform known as divorce. I am primarily more concerned with the arbitrary method than with the anarchic result. Very much as the old tyrant would turn any number of men out to grass, so the new tyrant would turn any number of women into grass widows. Anyhow, to vary the legendary symbolism, it never seems to occur to the king in his fairytale that the gold crown on his head is a less and not a more sacred and settled ornament than the gold ring on a woman's finger. This change is being achieved by the summary and even secret government which we now suffer, and this would be the first point against it, even if it were really an emancipation and is only in form of an emancipation. I will not anticipate the details of its defense which can be offered by others, but I will here conclude for the present by roughly suggesting the practical defenses of divorce as generally given just at present under four heads. And I will only ask the reader to note that they all have one thing in common, the fact that each argument is also used for all that social reform which plain men are already calling slavery. First it is very typical of the latest practical proposals that they are concerned with the case of those who are already separated, and the steps they must take to be divorced. There is a spirit penetrating all our society today by which the exception is allowed to alter the rule, the exile to deflect patriotism, the orphan to depose parenthood, and even the widow, or in this case as we have seen the grass widow, to destroy the position of the wife. There is a sort of symbol of this tendency in that mysterious and unfortunate nomadic nation which has been allowed to alter so many things from a crusade in Russia to a cottage in South Bucks. We have been told to treat the wandering Jew as a pilgrim, while we still treat the wandering Christian as a vagabond, and yet the latter is at least trying to get home, like Ulysses, where the former is, if anything, rather fleeing from home like Cain. He who is detached, disgruntled, nondescript, intermediate is everywhere made the excuse for altering what is common, corporate, traditional, and popular, and the alteration is always for the worse. The mermaid never becomes more womanly and only more fishy. The centaur never becomes more manly but only more horsey. The Jews do not find it easy to become a small proprietor. He is finding it far easier to become a slave. So the unfortunate man who cannot tolerate the woman he has chosen from all the women in the world is not encouraged to return to her and tolerate her, but encouraged to choose another woman whom he may in due course refuse to tolerate. And in all these cases the argument is the same, that the man in the intermediate state is unhappy. Probably he is unhappy since he is abnormal, but the point is that he is permitted to loosen the universal bond which has kept millions of others normal because he himself got into a hole. He is allowed to burrow in it like a rabbit and undermine the whole countryside. Next we have, as we always have, touching such crude experiments, an argument from the example of other countries, and especially of new countries. Thus the eugenics tells me solemnly that there have been very successful eugenic experiments in America, and they rigidly retain this solemnity while refusing, with many rebukes, to believe in mine. When I tell them that one of the eugenic experiments in America is a chemical experiment, which consists of changing a black man into the allotropic form of white ashes. It is really an exceedingly eugenic experiment, since his chief object is to discourage an interracial mixture of blood which is not desired. But I do not like this American experiment. However American, and I trust and believe that it is not typically American at all. It represents, I conceive, only one element in the complexity of the great democracy, and goes along with other evil elements, so that I am not at all surprised that the same strange social sections which permit a human being to be burned alive, also permit the exalted science of eugenics. It is the same in the milder matter of liquor laws, and we are told that certain rather crude colonials have established prohibition laws, which they try to evade. Just as we are told, they have established divorce laws, which they are now trying to repeal. For in this case of divorce, at least, the argument from distant precedents has recoiled crushingly upon itself. There is already an agitation for less divorce in America, even while there is an agitation for more divorce in England. Again, when an argument is based on a need of population, it will be well if though supporting it, realize where it may carry them. It is exceedingly doubtful whether population is one of the advantages of divorce, but there is no doubt that it is one of the advantages of polygamy. It is already used in Germany as an argument for polygamy. But the very word will teach us to look, even beyond Germany, for something yet more remote and repulsive. Mere population, along with a sort of polygamous energy, will not appear even as a practical ideal to anyone who considers, for instance, how consistently Europe has held the headship of the human race in face of the chaotic myriads of Asia. If population were the chief test of progress and efficiency, China would long ago have proved itself the most progressive and deficient state. Dequancy summed up the whole state of that enormous situation in a sense which is perhaps more impressive and even appalling, that all the perspectives of orient architecture and vistas of opium vision in the midst of which it comes. Man is a weed in those regions. Many Europeans, fearing for the garden of the world, have fancied that in some future fatality those weeds may spring up and choke it. But no Europeans have really wished that the flowers should become like the weeds, even if it were true, therefore, that the loosening of the tine necessarily increased the population, even if this were not contradicted as it is by the fact of many countries. We should have strong historical grounds for not accepting the deduction. We should still be suspicious of the paradox that we may encourage large families by abolishing the family. Lastly, I believe it is part of the defense of the new proposal, that even its defenders have found its principle a little too crude. I hear they have added provisions which modify their principle and which seem to be, in substance, first, that a man shall be made responsible for a money payment to his wife he deserts, and second, that the matter shall once again be submitted in some fashion to some magistrate. For my purpose here it's enough to know that there is something of the unmistakable saver of the sociology we resist in these two touching acts of faith in a checkbook and a lawyer. Most of the fashionable reformers of marriage would be faintly shocked at any suggestion that a poor old charwoman might possibly refuse such money, or that a good kind magistrate might not have the right to give such advice. For the reformers of marriage are very respectable people, with some honorable exceptions, and nothing could fit more smoothly into the rather greasy groove of their respectability than the suggestion that treason is best treated with the damages, gentlemen, heavy damages, of Mr. Sergeant Buzzfuzz, or that tragedy is best treated by the spiritual arbitment of Mr. Knupkins. One word should be added to this hasty sketch of the elements of the case. I've deliberately left out the loftiest aspect of the argument, that which sees marriage as divine institution, and that, for the logical reason, those who believe in this would not believe in divorce. And I am arguing with those who do believe in divorce. I do not ask them to assume the worth of my creed or any creed, and I could wish they did not so often ask me to assume the worth of their ruthless, poisonous, plutocratic, modern society. But if it could be shown, as I think it can, that a long historical view and a patient political experience can at last accumulate solid scientific evidence of the vital need of such a vow, then I can conceive no more tremendous tribute than this to any faith which made a flaming affirmation from the darkest beginnings of what the latest entitlement can only slowly discover in the end. The Superstition of Divorce by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 5 The Story of the Family The most ancient of human institutions has an authority that may seem as wild as anarchy. Alone among all such institutions it begins with a spontaneous attraction, and may be said strictly and not sentimentally, to be founded on love instead of fear. The attempt to compare it with coercive institutions complicating later history has led to infinite illogicality in later times. It is as unique as it is universal. There is nothing in any other social relations in any way parallel to the mutual attraction of the sexes. By missing this simple point, the modern world has fallen into a hundred follies. The idea of a general revolt of women against men has been proclaimed with flags and processions like a revolt of vassals against their lords, of blacks against black drivers, of Poles against Prussians, or Irishmen against the Englishmen, for all the world is if we really believed in the fabulous nation of the Amazons. The equally philosophical idea of a general revolt of men against women has been put into a romance by Sir Walter Bessent and into a sociological book by Mr. Belfort-Baxe, but at the first touch of this truth of an aboriginal attraction, all such comparisons collapse and are seen to be comic. Prussian does not feel from the first that he can only be happy if he spends his days and nights with a pole, and Englishmen does not think his house empty and cheerless unless it happens to contain an Irishman. A white man does not, in his romantic youth, dream of the perfect beauty of a black man. A railway magnet seldom writes poems about the personal fascination of a railway porter. All the other revolts against all the other relations are reasonable and even inevitable because those relations are originally only founded upon force or self-interest. Force can abolish what force can establish. Self-interest can terminate a contract when self-interest has dictated the contract. But the love of a man and a woman is not an institution that can be abolished. That is certain to outlast them all. All the other revolts are real because there remains a possibility that the things may be destroyed or at least divided. You can abolish capitalists, but you cannot abolish males. Prussians can go out of Poland or Negroes be repatriated to Africa, but a man and a woman must remain together in one way or another and must learn to put up with each other somehow. These are very simple truths. That is why nobody nowadays seems to take any particular notice of them. And the truth that follows next is equally obvious. There is no dispute about the purpose of nature in creating such an attraction. It would be more intelligent to call it the purpose of God, for nature can have no purpose unless God is behind it. The talk of the purpose of nature is to make a vain attempt to avoid being anthropomorphic, merely by being feminist. It is believing in a goddess because you are too skeptical to believe in a god. But this is a controversy which can be kept apart from the question. If we content ourselves with saying that the vital value ultimately found in this attraction is, of course, the renewal of the race itself, the child is an explanation of the father and the mother, and the fact that it is a human child is the explanation of the ancient human ties connecting the father and the mother. The more human, that is, the less bestial is the child, the more lawful and lasting are the ties. So far from any progress in culture or the sciences tending to loosen the bond, any such progress must logically tend to tighten it. The more things there are for the child to learn, the longer he must remain at the natural school for learning them, and the longer his teachers must at least postpone the dissolution of their partnership. The elementary truth is hidden today in vast masses of vicarious, indirect and artificial work, with the fundamental fallacy of which I shall deal in a moment. Here I speak of the primary position of the human group, as it has stood through unthinkable ages of waxing and waning civilizations, often unable to delegate any of its work, always unable to delegate all of it. In this, I repeat, it will always be necessary for the two teachers to remain together in proportion as they have anything to teach. One of the shapeless sea beasts that merely detaches itself from its offspring and floats away could float away to a submarine divorce court, or an advanced club founded on free love for fishes. The sea beast might do this precisely because the sea beast's offspring need do nothing, because it has not got to learn the polka or the multiplication table. All these are truisms, but they are also truths, and truths that will return for the present tangle of semi-official substitutes is not only a stopped gap, but one that is not big enough to stop the gap. If people cannot mine their own business, it cannot possibly be made economical to pay them to mind each other's business, and still less to mind each other's babies. It is simply throwing away a natural force and then paying for an artificial force, as if a man were to water a plant with a hose while holding up an umbrella to protect it from the rain. The hole really rests on a plutocratic illusion of an infinite supply of servants. When we offer any other system as a career for women, we are really proposing that an infinite number of them should become servants of a plutocratic or bureaucratic sort. Ultimately we are arguing that a woman should not be a mother to her own baby, but a nursemaid to somebody else's baby. But it will not work, even on paper. We cannot all live by taking in each other's washing, especially in the form of pinafores. In the last resort, the only people who either can or will give individual care to each of the individual children are their individual parents. The expression as applied to those dealing with changing crowds of children is a graceful and legitimate, flourishing speech. This triangle of trusums, a father and child, cannot be destroyed. It can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it. Most modern reformers are merely bottomless skeptics and have no basis on which to rebuild. And it is well that such reformers should realize that there is something they cannot reform. You can put down the mighty from their seat. You can turn the world upside down, and there is much to be said for the view that it may then be the right way up. But you cannot create a world in which the baby carries the mother. You cannot create a world in which the mother has not authority over the baby. You can waste your time in trying by giving votes to babies or proclaiming a republic of infants in arms. You can say, as an educationist said the other day, that small children should criticize, question authority, and suspend their judgment. I do not know why he did not go on to say that they should earn their own living, pay income tax to the state, and die in battle for the fatherland. For the proposal, evidently, is that children shall have no childhood. But you can, if you find entertainment in such games, organize representative government among little boys and girls, and tell them to take their legal and constitutional responsibilities as seriously as possible. In short, you can be crazy. But you cannot be consistent. You cannot really carry your own principle back to the aboriginal group and really apply it to the mother and the baby. You will not act on your own theory in the simplest and most practical of all possible cases. You are not quite as mad as that. This nucleus of natural authority has always existed in the midst of more artificial authorities. It has always been regarded as something in the literal sense individual. That is, as an absolute that could not really be divided. A baby was not even a baby apart from its mother. It was something else. It was probably a corpse. It was always recognized as standing in a peculiar relation to government simply because it was one of the few things that had not been made by government and could, to some extent, come into existence without the support of government. Indeed, the case forward is too strong to be stated. The case forward is that there is nothing like it. And we can only find faint parallels to it in these more elaborate and painful powers and institutions that are its inferiors. Thus the only way of conveying it is to compare it to a nation. Although compared to it, national divisions are as modern and formal as national anthems. Thus I may often use the metaphor of a city, though in its presence a citizen is as recent as a city clerk. It is enough to note here that everybody does know by intuition and admit by implication that a family is a solid fact, having a character and a color like a nation. The truth can be tested by the most modern and most daily experiences. A man does say this is the sort of thing the Browns will like, however tangled and interminable a psychological novel he might compose on the shades of difference between Mr. and Mrs. Brown. A woman does say, I don't like Jemima seeing so much of the Robinsons, and she does not always, in the scurry of her social or domestic duties, pause to distinguish the optimistic materialism of Mrs. Robinson from the more acid cynicism which tinges the hedonism of Mr. Robinson. There is a color of the household inside, as conspicuous as the color of the house outside. That color is a blend, and if any tint in it predominates, it is generally that preferred by Mr. Robinson. But like all composite colors, it is a separate color as separate as green is from blue and yellow. Every marriage is a sort of wild balance, and in every case the compromise is as unique as an eccentricity. Philanthropists walking in the slums often see the compromise in the street and mistake it for a fight. When they interfere, they are thoroughly thumped by both parties and serve them right for not respecting the very institution that brought them into the world. The first thing to see is that this enormous normality is like a mountain, and one that is capable of being a volcano. Every abnormality that is now opposed to it is like a mole hill, and the earnest sociological organizers of it are exceedingly like moles. But the mountain is a volcano in another sense also, as suggested in that tradition of the southern fields fertilized by lava. It has a creative as well as a destructive side, and it only remains, in this part of the analysis, to note the political effect of this extra political institution and the political ideals of which it has been the champion, and perhaps the only permanent champion. The ideal for which it stands in the state is liberty, for the very simple reason with which this rough analysis started. It is the only one of these institutions that is at once necessary and voluntary. It is the only check on the state that is bound to renew itself as eternally as the state, and more naturally than the state. Every sane man recognizes that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is non-entity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty, a limitation within which a citizen is a king. This is the only way in which truth can ever find refuge from public persecution, and the good man survived the bad government. But the good man by himself is no match for the city. There must be balanced against it another ideal institution, and in that sense an immortal institution. So long as the state is the only ideal institution, the state will call on the citizen to sacrifice himself, and therefore will not have the smallest scruple in sacrificing the citizen. The state consists of coercion, and must always be justified from its own point of view in extending the bounds of coercion, as for instance in the case of conscription. The only thing that can be set up to check or challenge this authority is a voluntary law and a voluntary loyalty. That loyalty is the protection of liberty, in the only sphere where liberty can fully dwell. It is a principle of the Constitution, that the king never dies. It is the whole principle of the family, that the citizen never dies. There must be a heraldry and heredity of freedom, a tradition of resistance to tyranny, a man must be not only free, but freeborn. Indeed there is something in the family that might loosely be called anarchistic, and more correctly called amateur. As there seems something almost vague about its voluntary origin, so there seems something vague about its voluntary organization. The most vital function it performs, perhaps the most vital function that anything can perform, is that of education. But its type of early education is far too essential to be mistaken for instruction. In a thousand things it works, rather by rule of thumb than by rule of theory. To take a commonplace and even comic example, I doubt if any textbook or code of rules has ever contained any directions about standing a child in a corner. Doubtless when the modern process is complete and the coercive principle of the state has entirely extinguished the voluntary element of the family, there will be some exact regulation or restriction about this matter. Possibly it will say that the corner must be at an angle of at least ninety-five degrees. Possibly it will say that the converging line of any ordinary corner tends to make a child squint. In fact I am certain that if I said casually, at a sufficient number of t-tables, that corners may children squint, it would rapidly become a universally received dogma of popular science. For the modern world will accept no dogmas upon any authority, but it will accept any dogmas on no authority. Say that a thing is so according to the pope or the Bible and it will be dismissed as the superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with, they say, or don't you know that, or try and fail to remember the names of some professor mentioned in some newspaper, and the keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say. This parentheses is not so irrelevant as it may appear, for it will be well to remember that when a rigid officialism breaks in upon the voluntary compromises of the home, that officialism itself will be only rigid in its action and will be exceedingly limp in its thought. Intellectually it will be at least as vague as the amateur arrangements of the home, and the only difference is that the domestic arrangements are in the only real sense practical, that is they are founded on experiences that have been suffered. The others are what is now generally called scientific, it is they are founded on experiments that have not yet been made. As a matter of fact, instead of invading the family with the blundering bureaucracy that mismanages the public services, it would be far more philosophical to work the reform the other way round. It would be really quite as reasonable to alter the laws of the nation so as to resemble the laws of the nursery. The punishments would be far less horrible, far more humorous, and far more really calculated to make men feel they had made fools of themselves. It would be a pleasant change if a judge instead of putting on the black cap had to put on the dunces cap, or if we could stand a financier in his own corner. Of course this opinion is rare and reactionary, whatever that may mean. Modern education is founded on the principle that a parent is more likely to be cruel than anybody else. It passes over the obvious fact that he is less likely to be cruel than anybody else. Nobody may happen to be cruel, but the first chances of cruelty come with a whole colorless and indifferent crowd of total strangers and mechanical mercenaries, whom it is now the custom to call in as infallible agents of improvement, policemen, doctors, detectives, inspectors, instructors, and so on. They are automatically given arbitrary power because there are here and there such things as a criminal parent, as if there were no such things as criminal doctors or criminal schoolmasters. A mother is not always judicious about her child's diet, so it is given into the control of Dr. Crippen. A father is thought not to teach his sons the purest morality, so they are put under the tutorship of Eugene Arum. These celebrated criminals aren't no more rare in their respective professions than the cruel parents are in the profession of parenthood. But indeed the case is far stronger than this, and there is no need to rely on a case of such criminals at all. The ordinary weaknesses of human nature will explain all the weaknesses of bureaucracy and business government all over the world. The official need only be an ordinary man to be more indifferent to other people's children than to his own, and even to sacrifice other people's family prosperity to his own. He may be bored, he may be bribed, he may be brutal. For any one of the thousand reasons that ever made a man a brute. All this elementary common sense is entirely left out of account in our educational and social systems of today. It is assumed that the hireling will not flee, and that solely because he is a hireling. It is denied that the shepherd will lay down his life for the sheep, or for that matter even that the she-wolf will fight for the cubs. We are to believe that mothers are inhuman, but not that officials are human. There are unnatural parents, but there are no natural passions. At least there are none where the fury of King Lear dared to find them in the beetle. Such is the latest light on the education of the young, and the same principle that is applied to the child is applied to the husband and wife, just as it assumes that a child will certainly be loved by anybody except his mother, so it assumes that a man can be happy with anybody except the one woman he has himself chosen for his wife. Thus the coercive spirit of the state prevails over the free promise of the family in the shape of formal officialism. But this is not the most coercive of the coercive elements in the modern Commonwealth. And even more rigid and ruthless external power is that of industrial employment and unemployment, and even more ferocious enemy of the family is the factory. Between these modern mechanical things, the ancient natural institution is not being reformed or modified or even cut down. It is being torn in pieces. It is not only being torn in pieces in the sense of a true metaphor like a living thing caught in a hideous clockwork of manufacture. It is being literally torn in pieces in that the husband may go to one factory, the wife to another, and the child to a third. Each will become the servant of a separate financial group, which is more and more gaining the political power of a feudal group. But whereas feudalism received the loyalty of families, the lords of the new survival state will receive only the loyalty of individuals, that is of lonely men and even of lost children. It is sometimes said that socialism attacks the family, which is foundered on little beyond the accident that some socialists believe in free love. I have been a socialist, and I am no longer a socialist, and at no time did I believe in free love. It is true, I think, in a large and unconscious sense that state socialism encourages the general coercive claim I have been considering. But if it be true that socialism attacks the family in theory, it is far more certain that capitalism attacks it in practice. It is a paradox, but a plain fact that men never notice anything as long as it exists in practice. Men who will note a heresy will ignore an abuse. That anyone who doubts the paradox imagine the newspapers formally printing along with the honors list a price list for peerages and knighthoods, though everybody knows they are bought and sold. So the factory is destroying the family, in fact, and need depend on no poor mad theorist who dreams of destroying it in fancy. And what is destroying it is nothing so plausible as free love, but something rather to be described as an enforced fear. It is an economic punishment, more terrible than legal punishment, which may yet land us in slavery as the only safety. From its first days in the forest, this human group had to fight against wild monsters, and so it is now fighting against these wild machines. It only managed to survive then, and it will only manage to survive now, by a strong internal sanctity, a tacit oath or dedication deeper than that of the city or the tribe. But though this silent promise was always present, it took, at a certain turning point of our history, a special form, which I shall try to sketch in the next chapter. The turning point was the creation of Christendom by the religion which created it. Nothing will destroy the sacred triangle, and even the Christian faith, the most amazing revolution that ever took place in the mind, served only, in a sense, to turn that triangle upside down. It held up a mystical mirror in which the order of the three things was reversed, and added a holy family of child, mother, and father to the human family of father, mother, and child. CHAPTER 6 THE STORY OF THE VOW Charles Lamb, with his fine, fantastic instinct for combinations that are also contrasts, has noted somewhere a contrast between St. Valentine and Valentine's. There seems a comic incongruity in such lively and frivolous rotations, still depending upon the date and title of an ascetic and celibate bishop of the Dark Ages. The paradox lends itself to his treatment, and there is truth in his view of it. Perhaps it may seem even more of a paradox to say there is no paradox. In such cases unification appears more provocative than division, and it may seem idly contradictory to deny the contradiction. And yet in truth there is no contradiction. In the deepest sense there is a very real similarity which puts St. Valentine and his Valentine's on one side and most of the modern world on the other. I should hesitate to ask, even a German professor, to collect, collate, and study carefully all the Valentine's in the world with the object of tracing a philosophical principle running through them. But if he did, I have no doubt about the philosophic principle he would find. However trivial, however imbecile, however vulgar or vapid or stereotyped the imagery of such things might be, it would always involve one idea, the same idea that makes lovers laboriously chip their initials on a tree or a rock in a sort of monogram of monogamy. It may be a cockney trick to tie one's love on a tree, though Orlando did it, and would now doubtless be arrested by the police for breaking the bylaws of the Forest of Arden. I'm not here concerned especially to commend the habit of cutting one's own name and private address in large letters on the front of the Parthenon, across the face of the Sphinx, or in any other nook or corner where it may chance to arrest the sentimental interest of posterity. But like many other popular things of the sort that can be generally found in Shakespeare, there is a meaning in it that would probably be missed by a less popular poet like Shelley. There is a very prominent truth in the fact that two free persons deliberately tie themselves to a log of wood, and it is the idea of tying oneself to something that runs through all this old amorous allegory like a pattern of fetters. There is always the notion of hearts chained together or skewed together, or in some manner secured. There is a security that can only be called captivity, that it frequently fails to secure itself as nothing to do with the present point. The point is that every philosophy of sex must fail which does not account for its ambition of fixity as well as for its experience of failure. There is nothing to make Orlando commit himself on the sworn evidence of the nearest tree. He is not bound to be bound. He is under constraint, but nobody constrains him to be under constraint. In short, Orlando took a vow to marry, precisely as Valentine took a vow not to marry. Nor could any ascetic, without being a heretic, have asserted in the wildest reactions of asceticism that the vow of Orlando was not lawful as well as the vow of Valentine. But it is a notable fact that even when it was not lawful it was still a vow. Through all that medieval culture which has left us the legend of romance, there ran this pattern of a chain which was felt as binding even where it ought not to bind. The lawless loves of medieval legends all have their own law, and especially their own loyalty, as in the tales of Tristum or Lancelot. In this sense we might say that medieval profligacy was more fixed than modern marriage. I am not here discussing either modern or medieval ethics in the matter of what they did or ought to say of such things. I am only noting, as a historical fact, the insistence of the medieval imagination, even at its wildest, upon one particular idea. That idea is the idea of the vow. It might be the vow which St. Valentine took. It might be a lesser vow which he regarded as lawful. It might be a wild vow which he regarded as quite lawless. But the whole society which made such festivals and bequeathed to us such traditions was full of the idea of vows, and we must recognize this notion, even if we think it nonsensical, as the note of the whole civilization. And Valentine and the Valentine both express it for us even more if we feel them both as exaggerated or even as exaggerating opposites. Those extremes meet, and they meet in the same place. Their tristing place is by the tree on which the lover hung his love-letters. And even if the lover hung himself on the tree instead of his literary compositions, even that act had about it also an indefinable flavor of finality. It is often said by the critics of Christian origins that certain ritual feasts, processions, or dances are really a pagan origin. They might as well say that our legs are a pagan origin. Nobody ever disputed that humanity was human before it was Christian, and no church manufactured the legs with which men walked or danced, either in a pilgrimage or a ballet. What can really be maintained so as to carry not a little conviction is this, that where such a church has existed it has preserved not only the processions but the dances, not only the cathedral, but the carnival. One of the chief claims of Christian civilization is to have preserved things of pagan origin. In short, in the old religious countries men continue to dance, while in the new scientific cities they are often content to drudge. But when this saner view of history is realized, there does remain something more mystical and difficult to define. Even heathen things are Christian when they have been preserved by Christianity. Chivalry is something recognizably different even from the Vertus of Virgil. Charity is something exceedingly different from the plain city of Homer. Even our patriotism is something more subtle than the undivided lover of the city, and the change is felt in the most permanent things, such as the love of landscape or the love of a woman. To define the differentiation in all these things will always be hopelessly difficult, but I would here suggest one element in the change, which is perhaps too much neglected, which at any rate ought not to be neglected, the nature of a vow. I might express it by saying that pagan antiquity was the age of status, that Christian medievalism was the age of vows, and that sceptical modernity has been the age of contracts, or rather has tried to be, and has failed. The outstanding example of status was slavery. Needless to say, slavery does not mean tyranny. Indeed, it need only be regarded relatively to other things to be regarded as charity. The idea of slavery is that large numbers of men are meant and made to do the heavy work of the world, and that others, while taking the margin of profits, must nevertheless support them while they do it. The point is not whether the work is excessive or moderate, or whether the condition is comfortable or uncomfortable. The point is that his work is chosen for the man, his status fixed for the man, and this status is forced on him by the law. As Mr. Balfour said about socialism, that is slavery, and nothing else is slavery. The slavery might well be, and often was, far more comfortable than the average free laborer, and certainly far more lazy than the average peasant. He was a slave because he had not reached his position by choice, or promise, or bargain, but merely by status. It is admitted that when Christianity had been for some time at work in the world, this ancient servile status began in some mysterious manner to disappear. I suggest here that one of the forms which the new spirit took was the importance of the vow. Feudalism, for instance, differed from slavery chiefly because feudalism was a vow. The vassal put his hands in those of his lord and vowed to be his man, but there was an accent on the noun substantive, as well as on the possessive pronoun. By swearing to be his man he proved he was not his chattel. Nobody exacts a promise from a pickaxe, or expects a poker to swear everlasting friendship with the tongs. Nobody takes the word of a spade, and nobody ever took the word of a slave. Marx at least a special stage of transition, that the form of freedom was essential to the fact of service, and even of servitude. In this way it is not a coincidence that the word homage actually means manhood. And if there was a vow, instead of status, even in the static parts of feudalism, it is needless to say that there was a wilder luxurience of vows in the more adventurous part of it. The whole of what we call chivalry was one great vow. Vows of chivalry varied infinitely, from the most solid to the most fantastic, from a vow to give all the spoils of conquest to the poor, to a vow to refrain from shaving until the first glimpse of Jerusalem. As I have remarked, this rule of loyalty, even in the unruly exceptions which prove the rule, ran through all the romances and songs of the troubadours, and there were always vows even when they were very far from being marriage vows. The idea is as much present in what they call the gay science of love as in what they call the divine science of theology. The modern reader will smile at the mention of these things as sciences, and will turn to study of sociology, ethnology, and psychoanalysis for if these are sciences, about which I would not divulge a doubt, at least nobody would insult them by calling them either gay or divine. I mean here to emphasize the presence, and not even to settle a proportion of this new notion in the Middle Ages. But the critic will be quite wrong if he thinks it enough to answer that all these things affected only a cultured class, not corresponding to the survival class of antiquity. When we come to workmen and small tradesmen, we find the same vague yet vivid presence of the spirit that can only be called the vow. In this sense there was a chivalry of trades as well as a chivalry of orders of knighthood, just as there was a heraldry of shop signs as well as a heraldry of shields. Only it happens that in the Enlightenment and liberation of the sixteenth century the heraldry of the rich was preserved, and the heraldry of the poor destroyed. And there is a sinister symbolism in the fact that almost the only emblem still hung above a shop is that of the three balls of lombardy. Of all those democratic glories nothing can now glitter in the sun except the sign of the golden usury that has devoured them all. The point here, however, is that the trade or craft had not only something like the crest but something like the vow of knighthood. There was in the position of the guildsmen the same basic notion that belonged to knights and even to monks. That was the notion of the free choice of affixed estate. We can realize the moral atmosphere if we compare the system of the Christian guilds not only with the status of the Greek and Roman slaves, but with such a scheme as that of the Indian castes. The Oriental caste has some of the qualities of the Occidental guild, especially the valuable quality of tradition and the accumulation of culture. Men might be proud of their castes as they were proud of their guilds, but they had never chosen their castes as they have chosen their guilds. They had never, within historic memory, even collectively created their castes as they collectively created their guilds. Like the slave system, the caste system was older than history. The heathens of modern Asia, as much as the heathens of ancient Europe, lived by the very spirit of status. Status in a trade has been accepted like status in a tribe, and that in a tribe of beasts and birds, rather than men. The fisherman continued to be a fisherman, as the fish continued to be a fish, and the hunter would no more turn into a cook than his dog would try its luck as a cat. Certainly his dog would not be found prostrated before the mysterious altar apache, barking or whining a wild lonely and individual vow that he at all costs would become a cat. Yet that was the vital revolt and innovation of vows as compared with castes or slavery, as when a man vowed to be a monk or the son of a cobbler, saluted the shrine of St. Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters. When he had entered the guild of the carpenters, he did indeed find himself responsible for a very real loyalty and discipline. But the whole social atmosphere surrounding his entrance was full of the sense of a separate and personal decision. There is one place where we can still find this sentiment, the sentiment of something at once free and final. We can feel it, if the service is properly understood, before and after the marriage vows at any ordinary wedding in any ordinary church. Such in a very vague outline has been the historical nature of vows, and the unique part they played in that many evil civilization out of which modern civilization rose or fell. We can now consider her a little less cloudly than it is generally considered nowadays, whether we really think vows are good things, whether they ought to be broken, as would naturally follow, whether they ought to be made. But we can never judge it fairly, till we face, as I have tried to suggest, this main fact of history, that the personal pledge, feudal or civic or monastic, was the way in which the world did escape from the system of slavery in the past, for the modern breakdown of mere contract leaves it still doubtful if there be any other way of escaping it in the future. The idea or at any rate the ideal of the thing called a vow is fairly obvious. It is to combine the fixity that goes with finality with the self-respect that only goes with freedom. The man is a slave, who is his own master, and a king, who is his own ancestor. For all kinds of social purposes he has the calculable orbit of the man in the caste or the servile state, but the story of his own soul he is still pursuing, at great peril, his own adventure. As seen by his neighbors he is as safe as if he mirrored in a But as seen by himself he may be forever, careering through the sky or crashing towards the earth in a flying ship. What is socially humdrum is produced by what is individually heroic, and a city is made not merely of citizens, but knight-errants. It is needless to point out the part played by the monastery in civilizing Europe in its most barbaric interregnum, and even those who still denounce the monasteries will be found denouncing them for these two extreme and apparently opposite eccentricities. They are blamed for the rigid character of their collective routine and also for the fantastic character of their individual fanaticism. For the purposes of this part of the argument, it would not matter if the marriage vow produced the most austere discomforts of the monastic vow. The point for the present is that it was sustained by a sense of free will and the feeling that its evils were not accepted but chosen. The same spirit ran through all the guilds and popular arts and spontaneous social systems of the whole civilization. It had all the discipline of an army, but it was an army of volunteers. The civilization of vows was broken up when Henry VIII broke his own vow of marriage, or rather it was broken up by a new cynicism in the ruling powers of Europe, of which that was the almost accidental expression in England. The monasteries that had been built by vows were destroyed, the guilds that had been regiments of volunteers were dispersed, the sacramental nature of marriage was denied, and many of the greatest intellects of the new movement, like Milton, are already indulged in a very modern idealization of divorce. The progress of this sort of emancipation advance step by step with the progress of that aristocratic ascendancy which has made the history of modern England, with all its sympathy with personal liberty and all its utter lack of sympathy with popular life. Marriage not only became less of a sacrament but less of a sanctity, yet threatened to become not only a contract but a contract that could not be kept. For this one question has retained a strange symbolic supremacy amid all the similar questions which seems to perpetuate the coincidence of the origin. It began with divorce for the king, and it is now ending in divorce for a whole kingdom. The modern era that followed can be called the era of contract, but it can still more truly be called the era of Leonine contract. The nobles of the new time first robbed the people, and then offered to bargain with them. It would not be an exaggeration to say that they first robbed the people, and then offered to cheat them. For their rents were competitive rents, their economics competitive economics, their ethics competitive ethics. They applied not only legality but petty fogging. No more was heard of the customary rents of the medieval estates, just as no more was heard of the standard wages of the medieval guilds. The object of the whole process was to isolate the individual poor man in his dealings with the individual rich man, and then offer to buy and sell with him, though it must necessarily be himself that was bought and sold. In the matter of labor, that is, though a man was supposed to be in the position of a seller, he was more and more really in the position of a slave. Unless the tendency be reversed, he will probably become admittedly a slave. It is to say the word slave will never be used, for it is always easy to find an inoffensive word, but he will be admittedly a man legally bound to a certain social service in return for economic security. In other words, the modern experiment of mere contract has broken down. Trusts as well as trade unions express the fact that it has broken down. Social reform, socialism, guild socialism, syndicalism, even organized philanthropy are so many ways of saying that it has broken down. The substitute for it may be the old one of status, but it must be something having some of the stability of status. So far, history has found only one way of combining that sort of stability with any sort of liberty. In this sense, there is a meaning in the much misused phrase about the army of industry. But the army must be stiffened, either by the discipline of conscripts or by the vows of volunteers. If we may extend the doubtful metaphor of an army of industry to cover the yet weaker phrase about captains of industry, there is no doubt about what those captains at present command. They work for a centralized discipline in every department. They erect a vast apparatus of supervision and inspection. They support all the modern restrictions touching drink and hygiene. They may be called the friends of temperance or even of happiness, but even their friends would not call them the friends of freedom. There is only one form of freedom which they tolerate, and that is the sort of sexual freedom which is covered by the legal fiction of divorce. If we ask why this liberty is alone left when so many liberties are lost, we shall find the answer in the summary of this chapter. They are trying to break the vow of the night as they broke the vow of the monk. They recognize the vow as the vital antithesis to survival status, the alternative and therefore the antagonist. Marriage makes a small state within the state which resists all such regimentation. That bond breaks all other bonds. That law is found stronger than all later and lesser laws. They desire the democracy to be sexually fluid because the making of small nuclei is like the making of small nations. Like small nations they are a nuisance to the mind of imperial scope. In short what they fear in the most literal sense is home rule. Men can always be blind to a thing so long as it is big enough. It is so difficult to see the world in which we live that I know that many will see all I have said here of slavery as nonsensical nightmare. And if my association of divorce with slavery seems only a far-fetched and theoretical paradox, I should have no difficulty in replacing it by a concrete and familiar picture. Let them merely remember the time when they read Uncle Tom's Cabin and ask themselves whether the oldest and simplest of the charges against slavery has not always been the breaking up of families.