Part 2

Mrs. Caird's demand for greater laxity of the marriage bond _ab initio_, the nature of the contract being left to the contracting parties, like a marriage settlement, is quite outside the sphere of practical politics, as she is herself quite aware. If men were but educated up to the Shelleyan ideal, then we might try all sorts of delightful experiments in marriage, and gradually arrive at absolute freedom of contract, which would _not_ mean that absolutely unsentimental hygienic promiscuity which is the ideal of the highly advanced physiologist. But men are not yet harmonious creatures, like Wordsworth's cloud, which "moveth altogether if it move at all." They are torn by their lusts which war in their members. Hence these bonds. Lust, lust, lust: this is the most concentrated form of selfishness--the undying worm at the root of the Tree of Life. This is the tyrant that women have at last begun to recognize as their deadly adversary and to fight against. Shelley, a better physician than Goethe, laid his finger on this plague-spot, and told the age plainly: "Thou ailest here." But he did not see that instead of saying, "Abolish marriage and prostitution will cease," he ought to have said, "Abolish prostitution and marriage will cease"--marriage without love being only a particular form of prostitution. He did not see that the abolition of marriage would no more get rid of lust than the abolition of private property would get rid of selfishness. We have already, in monogamic marriage, struggled painfully upward to the level of the higher animals; let us not imperil this progress rashly.

The Cythnas of the present day have felt their burthens more directly than Shelley did. Hence their demand for economic independence, that they may not be forced into marriage or prostitution by the various degrees of starvation. Their demand is a just one, and must be satisfied somehow, even if we have to put a bonus upon womanhood and pay women, not merely fair wages for their work of all kinds, but a tribute to them as women, as potential mothers, which shall fairly handicap the sexes in the struggle for existence, and put men more on their good behaviour.

Shelley, the mystic, who looked for a miraculous change in nature coincident with a miraculous change in man, seems to have seen, almost as little as the average socialist of the present day, who believes in the spiritual efficacy of a purely material revolution, that the ideals and interests of the two sexes are widely apart, more so now than ever before probably. He, like the socialist, in his impatience to arrive at a practical solution of the life-problem, did not take the trouble to understand the true bearing of the doctrine of Malthus. He did not see that whether Malthus's figures be right or wrong, it is a fact that the population of any given district (be it an English barony, or the world itself) tends to increase up to the limits of its food-supply, taking the word _food_ in its very widest sense to signify all the means of well-being; and that this tendency is a fundamental element in all social problems, just as friction is in all mechanical problems. He did not see that, other things being the same, a higher standard of comfort, while, finally tending to diminish the rate of increase of population, first increases its pressure. He did not contemplate that strike against child-bearing on the part of women, which is induced, not merely by the desire for personal comfort, but is largely due to the vague influence of those new ideals of which he was himself the prophet. He, like the socialist, thought that we might go on increasing and multiplying _ad libitum_, till we reached the ultimate limit of standing-room on the earth, and of miraculous chemical food out of the air, and began, as astral bodies, to emigrate to Mars. Women know better than this; and feel the pinch of population, when what they just now consider their higher life is hampered by children. The woman who has one child more than she wants is an over-populated woman; and the advanced woman of the present day, having her own higher culture, and the culture of humanity, on the brain, possibly with a high ideal of the duties of maternity, and frequently a sickly and weary creature, morbid in body and mind, is very easily over-populated. Hence much social discomfort. Shelley does not seem to have contemplated this, nor seen that the good-natured acceptance of the feminine ideal by man might lead him, like poor St. Peter in his old age, "whither he would not." How all this is going to end I confess I don't know. I trust in more delicate adjustments, a higher and more wholesome life all round; but the ascent of man is always a painful process. Meanwhile it is quite time for this bald, disjointed chat of mine to come to an end.

_London: Printed by Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, Bread Street Hill. September, 1889._

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Transcriber's note:

Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

The original text includes Greek characters. For this text version these letters have been replaced with transliterations.

The misprint "tempation" has been corrected to "temptation" (page 15).