marriage laws means either downright ruin or such inconvenience
and disablement as a prudent man or woman would get married ten
times over rather than face. And these disablements and
inconveniences are not even the price of freedom; for, as Brieux
has shewn so convincingly in Les Hannetons, an avowedly illicit
union is often found in practice to be as tyrannical and as hard
to escape from as the worst legal one.

We may take it then that when a joint domestic establishment,
involving questions of children or property, is contemplated,
marriage is in effect compulsory upon all normal people; and until
the law is altered there is nothing for us but to make the best of
it as it stands. Even when no such establishment is desired,
clandestine irregularities are negligible as an alternative to
marriage. How common they are nobody knows; for in spite of the
powerful protection afforded to the parties by the law of libel,
and the readiness of society on various other grounds to be
hoodwinked by the keeping up of the very thinnest appearances,
most of them are probably never suspected. But they are neither
dignified nor safe and comfortable, which at once rules them out
for normal decent people. Marriage remains practically inevitable;
and the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we shall set to
work to make it decent and reasonable.


WHAT DOES THE WORD MARRIAGE MEAN

However much we may all suffer through marriage, most of us think
so little about it that we regard it as a fixed part of the order
of nature, like gravitation. Except for this error, which may be