nothing to do, there is now no need to deal. The vogue of "the
self-regarding action" has passed; and it may be assumed without
argument that unions for the purpose of establishing a family
will continue to be registered and regulated by the State.
Such registration is marriage, and will continue to be called
marriage long after the conditions of the registration have
changed so much that no citizen now living would recognize them as
marriage conditions at all if he revisited the earth. There is
therefore no question of abolishing marriage; but there is a very
pressing question of improving its conditions. I have never met
anybody really in favor of maintaining marriage as it exists in
England to-day. A Roman Catholic may obey his Church by assenting
verbally to the doctrine of indissoluble marriage. But nobody
worth counting believes directly, frankly, and instinctively that
when a person commits a murder and is put into prison for twenty
years for it, the free and innocent husband or wife of that
murderer should remain bound by the marriage. To put it briefly, a
contract for better for worse is a contract that should not be
tolerated. As a matter of fact it is not tolerated fully even by
the Roman Catholic Church; for Roman Catholic marriages can be
dissolved, if not by the temporal Courts, by the Pope.
Indissoluble marriage is an academic figment, advocated only by
celibates and by comfortably married people who imagine that if
other couples are uncomfortable it must be their own fault, just
as rich people are apt to imagine that if other people are poor it
serves them right. There is always some means of dissolution. The
conditions of dissolution may vary widely, from those on which
Henry VIII. procured his divorce from Katharine of Arragon to the
pleas on which American wives obtain divorces (for instance,
"mental anguish" caused by the husband's neglect to cut his