within the house or else run a heavy risk of overstraining their
domestic relations. When the pair is so poor that it can afford
only a single room, the strain is intolerable: violent quarrelling
is the result. Very few couples can live in a single-roomed
tenement without exchanging blows quite frequently. In the
leisured classes there is often no real family life at all. The
boys are at a public school; the girls are in the schoolroom in
charge of a governess; the husband is at his club or in a set
which is not his wife's; and the institution of marriage enjoys
the credit of a domestic peace which is hardly more intimate than
the relations of prisoners in the same gaol or guests at the same
garden party. Taking these two cases of the single room and the
unearned income as the extremes, we might perhaps locate at a
guess whereabout on the scale between them any particular family
stands. But it is clear enough that the one-roomed end, though its
conditions enable the marriage vow to be carried out with the
utmost attainable exactitude, is far less endurable in practice,
and far more mischievous in its effect on the parties concerned,
and through them on the community, than the other end. Thus we see
that the revolt against marriage is by no means only a revolt
against its sordidness as a survival of sex slavery. It may even
plausibly be maintained that this is precisely the part of it that
works most smoothly in practice. The revolt is also against its
sentimentality, its romance, its Amorism, even against its
enervating happiness.


WANTED: AN IMMORAL STATESMAN

We now see that the statesman who undertakes to deal with marriage