The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family by Ch. Letourneau - HTML preview

CHAPTER XX.
 MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY IN THE PAST, THE PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE.

I. The Past.—Sociology and evolution—Sociology and scientific method—The biological reason of marriage and the family—Primitive forms of marriage—Its evolution—Consanguineous primitive groups—The evolution of the family—The stages of this evolution—From communism to individualism—Advantages of the primitive clan—Polygamy and statistics of births.

II. The Present.—Present marriage in Europe—The dangers of celibacy according to A. Bertillon—They marry who can—Imperfect categories of celibates—Money and matrimony—Selection by money—Marriages by purchase.

III. The Future.—Prehistoric peoples still surviving—Progress is the law of the world—The meaning of matrimonial and familial evolution—Sociological rhythms—Future collective societies—The family and society—Progress of conjugal discord—The marriage of the future—Herbert Spencer and Montaigne—Slowness of social evolutions—Conservatives and innovators—Nothing dies; everything is renewed.

I. The Past.

In the preceding chapters I have attempted to describe how men of all countries and all races have more or less constituted and organised their marriage and their family, and for this purpose I have patiently classified a multitude of facts collected singly by an army of observers.

Moreover, in conformity with the method of evolution, and in order not to neglect the most distant sources, I have prefaced my minute inquiry into marriage and the family among men by an investigation of the same kind in regard to animals. Man is neither a demi-god nor an angel; he is a primate more intelligent than the others, and his relationship with the neighbouring species of the animal kingdom is more strongly shown in his psychic than in his anatomical traits.

More than once, I fear, the accumulation of detailed facts which forms the groundwork of this book may have fatigued my readers; but this is the only condition on which it is possible to give a solid basis to sociology. It is, in fact, nothing less than a matter of creating a new science. We are scarcely beginning to be really acquainted with mankind, to take a complete survey of it in time and space. Now this would be quite impossible without the help of comparative ethnography. We must regard the existing inferior races as survivals, as prehistoric or protohistoric types that have persisted through long ages, and are still on different steps of the ladder of progress; it is this view alone which we shall find suggestive and enlightening; and it is in strict correlation with the method of evolution, to which, indeed, it owes its value.

The innumerable dissertations on the history of marriage and of the family which appeared previous to the rise of scientific method, have necessarily been devoid of accuracy and especially of breadth of thought. A thick veil concealed the real origin of these institutions; religious legends, that had become venerable on account of their antiquity, paralysed scientific investigation. To submit our social institutions to the great law of evolution, by means of disagreeable researches, was not to be tolerated by public opinion. In fact, if marriage and the family have been constantly modified in the past, we cannot maintain that these institutions will remain for ever crystallised in their present state. Until this revolutionary idea had taken root and become sufficiently acclimatised in public opinion, all so-called social studies were scarcely more than empty lucubrations. From time to time, no doubt, a few bold innovators, braving scoffs or even martyrdom, have dared to construct theories of new societies; but, being insufficiently informed, they could only create Utopias contemned by the mass of the public. Scientific sociology builds its edifice stone by stone; its duty is to bind the present to the most distant past; its honour will lie in furnishing a solid basis of operation to the innovators of the future; but this new branch of human knowledge can only grow by submitting to the method of the natural sciences. Before everything else, it is important to classify the facts that have been observed. This course is imperative. It is dry, and lends itself with difficulty to oratorical effusions, but no other path can lead to the truth. My constant anxiety has been to be faithful to it, and as an anthropologist I have especially borrowed my materials from ethnography. Step by step, and following as much as possible the hierarchic order of human races and of civilisations, I have described the modes of marriage and of the family adopted by the numerous varieties of the human type; I have endeavoured to note the phases of their evolution, and to show how superior forms have evolved from inferior ones. Now that I am at the end of my inquiry, it will be well to sum up clearly its result.

The prime cause of marriage and the family is purely biological; it is the powerful instinct of reproduction, the condition of the duration of species, and the origin of which is necessarily contemporaneous with that of primal organisms, of protoplasmic monads, multiplying themselves by unconscious scissiparity. By a slow specialisation of organs and functions, in obedience to the laws of evolutionary selection, various animal types have been created; and when they have been provided with separate sexes and conscious nervous centres, procreation has become a tyrannic need, driving males and females to unite in order to fulfil the important function of reproduction.

In this respect man is strictly assimilable to the other animals, and with him as with them all the intoxication of love has for its initial principle the elective affinity of two generating cellules of different sex. So far, this is mere biology, but it results, among superior animals, in sociological phenomena, in pairings which endure after the satisfaction of procreative needs, and produce in outline some forms of human marriage, or rather, of sexual union in humanity—namely, promiscuity, polygamy, and even monogamy. Our most primitive ancestors, our precursors, half men and half apes, have certainly had extremely gross customs, which are still in great measure preserved among the least developed races.

The study, however, of contemporary savage societies proves to us that absolutely unbridled promiscuity, without rule or restraint, is very rare even in inferior humanity. In exceptional cases, individuals of both sexes may have abandoned themselves, of common accord, to promiscuity, as did the Polynesian areoïs; but these instances relate to acts of debauchery, and not to a regulated social condition compatible with the maintenance of an ethnic group. The conjugal form nearest to promiscuity is the collective marriage of clan to clan—as, for example, that of the Kamilaroi, amongst whom all the men of one clan are reputed brothers to each other, and at the same time husbands of all the women of a neighbouring clan, reputed also sisters to each other. Other varieties of sexual association are more common, and may be arranged under the general heads of promiscuity, polygamy, polyandry, and monogamy. We hear also of temporary unions, marriages for a term, and partial marriages concluded at a debated price for certain days of the week only, etc. Every possible experiment, compatible with the duration of savage or barbarous societies, has been tried, or is still practised, amongst various races, without the least thought of the moral ideas generally prevailing in Europe, and which our metaphysicians proclaim as innate and necessary. Having elsewhere demonstrated at length the relativity of morality, I will not go over the ground again, but will quote on this point some lines of Montaigne:—“The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom; every one having an inward veneration for the opinions and manners approved and received amongst his own people, cannot without very great reluctancy depart from them, nor apply himself to them without applause.... The common fancies that we find in repute everywhere about us, and infused into our mind with the seed of our fathers, appear to be most universal and genuine. From whence it comes to pass, that whatever is off the hinges of custom is believed to be also off the hinges of reason.”[1108] The partial marriages of the Hassinyeh Arabs are surely off the hinges of our custom; and it is the same with polyandry, which borders on these partial marriages, but is much more widely spread. Like everything else, polyandric marriage has evolved, from its most complete form, that of the Naïrs, to the polyandry in use in Thibet, which already inclines towards monandry and the paternal family. Primitive polyandry has easily arisen from the marriage by classes practised by many savage clans; but most often it is polygamy which has sprung from it. And the latter must frequently have been established from the first in primitive hordes, simply by the right of the strongest.

Man may be monogamous in the very lowest degree of savagery and stupidity; certain animals are so; but in humanity it is more often the instinct of polygamy which predominates; and therefore, when in the course of the progressive evolution of societies monogamy at length became moral and legal, men have been careful to soften its rigour by maintaining together with it concubinage and prostitution, and by generally leaving to the husband the right of repudiation, which has nearly always been refused to the wife. This injustice appeared quite natural, for as the wife had usually been captured or bought, she was considered as the property of the man, and held in strict subjection. At length, in its last form, monogamic marriage, which had at first been the association of a master and a slave, tended more and more to become the union of two persons, living on a footing of equality.

The family has undergone a similar evolution. Apart from a few exceptional cases of precocious monogamy (Veddahs, Boshimans, etc.), ethnography shows us the greater number of savage races living in little consanguine groups, in which the kinship is still confused and the solidarity strong. The degrees of consanguinity are not well defined; real kinship is easily confounded with fictitious kinship, and classes of relations are created, ranged under the same title, although very differently united by ties of blood. The woman nearly always bears children for her group, or clan, and this clan is very often exogamic; this exogamy is practised from clan to clan, and only within the tribe. There is no absolute rule, however, and it is not unusual to see endogamy elbow exogamy.

In the large and confused family of the clan, all the members of which were bound together by a strict solidarity of interests and a real or fictitious kinship, the restricted family became gradually established by a reaction of individual interests. On account of the more or less complete confusion of sexual unions, the first to become detached from the consanguine clan was the maternal family, based on uterine filiation, the only filiation capable of sure proof; but the great association of all the members of the clan still existed. By the simple fact of birth in this little ethnic group, the individual had rights to the territory of the clan and his share in the common resources; his clan were bound to give him aid, assistance, and, at need, vengeance also. In proportion as the family assumed more distinct proportions in the clan, it tended to become separate from it, and then, nearly always, it was based not on maternal but on paternal filiation. This did not come to pass in a day; it took a long time to arrive at the point of attributing to such or such a man the ownership of one or more women and their progeny. The ridiculous ceremonial of the couvade was probably invented during this period of transition, when it was no easy matter for a man to obtain the recognition of his paternal title and rights by the other men of the clan. For a long time the maternal family resisted the enthronisation of the paternal family, and here and there it succeeded in maintaining its existence, and in serving as a basis for the transmission of inheritance. For, whether paternal or maternal, the institution of the family, when well consolidated, had for its result the parcelling out of the possessions of the ancient clans, and the creation of familial or individual property on the ruins of the ancient common property. Finally, nothing more remained of the clan, or gens, but the sign or totem, the name, and a kinship, also nominal, between the various families that had come from it.

The system and the vocabulary of kinship were then renewed; to the classificatory mode, grouping the relations by classes, without much care as to consanguinity, has succeeded the descriptive mode, which carefully specifies the degree of consanguinity of each person, and distinguishes a direct line from collateral lines, and in which each individual is the centre of a group of relations.

In a remarkable book, which has not yet had all the success it deserves, Lewis Morgan believes he has recognised five stages in the evolution of the family: 1st, the family is consanguineous—that is to say, founded on the marriage of brothers and sisters of a group; 2nd, several brothers are the common husbands of their wives, who are not sisters; 3rd, a man and woman unite, but without exclusive cohabitation, and with faculty of divorce for one or the other; 4th, then comes the pastoral family of the Hebrews, the marriage of one man with several women; but this patriarchal form has not been universal; 5th, at last appeared the family of civilised societies, the most modern, characterised by the exclusive cohabitation of one man and one woman. Not taking this classification too literally, and reserving a place for varieties and exceptions, we have here five stages which mark tolerably well the evolution of the family in humanity.

The moral direction of this slow transformation is evident; it proceeds from a communism more or less extensive to individualism; from the clan, where all is solidarity, to the family and the individual, having their own interests, which are as distinct as possible from those of other families and other individuals. Each one has endeavoured to get for himself as large a share as possible of that which was formerly held in common; each man has aimed at obtaining a more and more exclusive right over property, wife, and children. From these appetites, more economic than ethereal, have at length proceeded the patriarchal family, monogamy, and familial property, and later, individual property;[1109] the régime of the family and that of property have evolved in company. But this transformation has been effected by extremely slow degrees; for a long time the new régime bore the mark of the old one in certain rights reserved to the clan, in certain prohibitions, in certain obligations, which still imposed some solidarity on individuals—as, for example, the legal injunction to help a man in peril, to hasten to the assistance of a village plundered by robbers, the general duty of hospitality, etc.—all of them precepts formulated by the codes of Egypt and India, and still to be found in Kabylie, and which have disappeared from our frankly individualistic, or rather egoistic, modern legislations.

It is indisputable that this evolution has everywhere coincided with a general progress in civilisation, and the advance has been sensibly the same among the peoples of all races, on the sole condition that they should have emerged from savagery. Everywhere, in the end, the paternal family and monogamic marriage have become a sort of ideal to which men have striven to conform their customs and institutions. It has very naturally been concluded that these last forms of the family and of conjugal union have an intrinsic sociologic superiority over the others, that in all times and places they strengthen the ethnic group, and create for it better conditions in its struggle for existence. But this reasoning has nothing strict in it; civilisation is the result of very complex influences, and if a certain social practice has been adopted by inferior races, it does not logically follow that it is, for that reason only, bad in itself. What seems indisputable is, that man tends willingly towards individualism, and yields himself up to it with joy as soon as that becomes possible to him, thanks to the general progress of civilisation. At the origin of civilisations, in a tribe of savages, surrounded with perils, and painfully struggling for existence, a more or less strict solidarity is imperative; the co-associates must necessarily form as it were a large family, in which a more or less communal régime is essential. The children, the weak ones, and the women have more chance of surviving if in some measure they belong to the entire clan; perpetual war soon cuts down a great number of men; it is therefore necessary that their widows and children should find support and protection without difficulty, and the régime of the clan, with its wide and confused kinship, lends itself better to this helpful fraternity than a strict distinction of tuum and meum applied to property and persons. The same may be said of patriarchal polygamy, which often flourished on the ruins of the clan. For this régime to become general, it is necessary that, in the ethnic group, the proportion of the sexes should be to the advantage of the feminine sex; in this case it is imperative, and evidently becomes favourable to the maintenance of the social body; in fact it guarantees the women against desertion, augments the number of births, and assures to the children the care of one or more adoptive mothers, if the real mother happens to die. The opinion of Herbert Spencer, who quite à priori attributes to monogamy a diminution in the mortality of children,[1110] is a most hazardous one. By the last census taken in Algeria we learn, not without surprise, that the increase in the indigenous Mussulman and polygamic population was much superior to that of the most prolific of the European monogamous states. Polygamy may therefore have its utilitarian value, and this is the case as soon as it adapts itself to the general conditions of social life.

II. The Present.

It is many centuries since Europe adopted monogamic marriage as the legal type of the sexual union. That there exists by the side of regular marriage a considerable margin, in which are still found nearly all the other forms of sexual association, we do not deny; but in France, for example, two-thirds of the population live so entirely under the régime of legal monogamy, that it would be evidently superfluous to describe it here; it is, in substance, the Roman marriage, the bonds of which Christianity has striven to lighten. In the general opinion, marriage such as our laws and customs require it to be, is the most perfect type possible of conjugal union; and this current appreciation has not been a little strengthened by a learned treatise, frequently quoted, and of which I cannot dispense with saying a few words.

In 1859, a justly celebrated demographer, whom I have the honour to call friend, Dr. Adolphe Bertillon, published a monograph on marriage, which made a great sensation.[1111]

This work, bristling with figures, scrupulously collected and strictly accurate, proves or seems to prove that the celibate third of the French population is, by reason of its celibacy, struck with decay, and plays the part of an inferior race by the side of the married two-thirds. In comparative tables, which are extremely clear, A. Bertillon follows step by step the different fates of the married and unmarried, and he shows us that at every age the celibate population is struck by a mortality nearly twice as great as the other; that its births merely make up 45 per cent. of its annual losses; that it counts every year twice as many cases of madness, twice as many suicides, twice as many attempts on property, and twice as many murders and acts of personal violence. Consequently, the State has to maintain for this celibate population twice as many prisons, twice as many asylums and hospitals, twice as many undertakers,[1112] etc. These revelations, absolutely true as raw results, caused a great commotion in the little public specially occupied with demography and sociology. Their alarm was soon calmed.

From his interesting work A. Bertillon had drawn conclusions which were very doubtful, taking surely the effect for the cause, by attributing the inferiority of the celibate population solely to its celibacy. If this be so, we have only to marry these weak ones in order to raise them; but the superiority of the married population, which on the whole is indisputable, does not necessarily imply the superiority of the marriage state.

It is in consequence of economic hindrances, and of physical or psychical inferiority, that, in the greater number of cases, people resign themselves to celibacy. Those who wish to marry cannot always do so, and A. Bertillon knew better than any one that the number of marriages, the age at marriage, the number of children by marriage, etc., depend in the mass not on individual caprice, but on causes altogether general. Setting aside money considerations—which are so powerful, and to which I shall presently return—and confining our calculation to persons of normal endowment, it is probable that there is more energy, more moral and intellectual vitality, in those who bravely face the risk of marriage than in the timid celibates; but it is certain that the celibate population, taken as a whole, includes the majority of the human waste of a country. At the time when A. Bertillon wrote his learned treatise, in 1859, statistics prove the existence in France of 370,018 infirm persons,[1113] of whom the greater number were evidently condemned to celibacy by the very fact of their infirmity. On the other hand, it is probable that among the beggars, properly so called, there is a large proportion of celibates, without counting the infirm; now in 1847 there were 337,838 beggars in France.[1114]

To these lists of unwilling celibates must be added, especially, the virile population in the army, the mortality in which was, as we well know, double that of the civil population. Now, on the 1st January 1852, the French army counted 354,960 men.[1115] To these matrimonial non-values, contributing a larger tithe to sickness and death, must be further joined the celibates from religious vows. The census shows 52,885 of the latter. Without any ill-feeling towards the Catholic clergy, we may be allowed to hold the opinion that the very fact of a man’s vowing himself to celibacy—that is to say, of setting at nought the desires of nature and the needs of the society of which he forms a part—merely for metaphysical motives, often implies a certain degree of mental inferiority. The special statistics of the little ecclesiastical world are not published in France; but M. Duruy having once had the happy thought of ascertaining from the judicial pigeon-holes the number of crimes and misdemeanours committed by the members of religious orders engaged in teaching, compared with those of lay schoolmasters, during a period of thirty months, the result of the inquiry showed that, proportionally to the number of schools, the former were guilty of four times as many misdemeanours and twelve times as many crimes as the latter.[1116] Short as the period of observation was, this enormous difference gives matter for reflection, although it may not have the value of a law.

But the principal causes which influence matrimony are the greater or less facility of existence, and the extreme importance attached to money. As a general rule, life and death tend to balance each other, and the populations whose mortality is great have, as compensation, a rich birthrate. We invariably see the number of marriages and births increasing after a series of prosperous years, and vice versâ. General causes have naturally a greater influence on the population living from hand to mouth. The well-to-do classes escape this, and we even find that the chances of marriage for the rich increase during years of high prices.[1117]

We can scarcely attribute to anything else but an excessive care for money and a forethought pushed to timidity some very disquieting traits in our marriage and birth rates in France. I will merely recall, by the way, the continually decreasing excess of our births, which, if not stopped by radical social reforms, can only end in our final decay.

The fear of marriage and the family is the particular feature of French matrimoniality. The desirable age for marriage, says A. Bertillon,[1118] is from twenty-two to twenty-five for men, and from nineteen to twenty for women. In England more than half the marriages for men (504 in 1000) and nearly two-thirds of those of women are contracted before the age of twenty-five. Now, this is only the case in France for 0.29, and in Belgium for 0.20 of the marriages. A demographical phenomenon of the same kind is observed in Italy, where only 232 men out of 1000 marry before the age of twenty-five.[1119] At Paris, where the struggle for existence is more severe, and where the care for money is more predominant, late marriages abound, and it is only above the age of forty for men and thirty-five for women that the marriage rate equals, and even exceeds, that of the whole of France;[1120] it is self-evident that the result of this must be a decrease in the total of births by marriage. Whether these facts proceed from the growing difficulties of existence, or from a fear, always augmenting also, of trouble and care, or from these two causes combined and mutually strengthening each other, the consequence is the same: marriages are becoming more and more simple commercial transactions, from whence arises the worst and most shameful of selections—selection by money. As a moral demographer, A. Bertillon thunders against what he calls “the system of dower” more peculiar to the Latin races, since we get it from Rome, where recourse was doubtless had to it in order to emancipate patrician women from strict conjugal servitude. But the remedy has become an evil, and it is surely to the love of the dowry rather than to “the beautiful eyes of the casket” that must be attributed a whole list of true marriages by purchase, much more common in our own country than elsewhere. Sometimes it is old men who conjugally purchase young girls, and sometimes old women who buy young husbands. I will especially notice this last category of marriages by purchase. As regards them, France is unworthily distinguished beyond other nations. In our tables of statistics, for example, the proportionate number of marriages between bachelors from eighteen to forty years and women of fifty and upwards, is ten times greater than in England.[1121]

Marriages with Women of Fifty Years and upwards. (In a million marriages.)

We must remark, in comparing these tables, that the first group, including the married men from eighteen to twenty years with women of fifty and upwards, is unknown in England; and that the second group, that of the married men of twenty to twenty-five years with women of fifty years and upwards, is scarcely represented. The comparison is not flattering for us. It is important to note, also, that these figures only refer to first marriages. Tables of the same kind, showing the marriages between young girls and old men, or between aged widows and young men, would add to our confusion, and bring to our thoughts the picturesque exclamation which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of King Lear—“Fie! Fie! Fie! Pah! Pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.”[1122]

Marriages with Men of Sixty Years and upwards.

III. The Future.

What will marriage and the family become in the future? For one who is not a prophet by supernatural inspiration, it is hazardous to make predictions. The future, nevertheless, is born from the womb of the past, and, after having patiently scrutinised the evolution of bygone ages, we may legitimately risk a few inductions with regard to the ages to come. Doubtless the primitive forms of marriage and the family will persist, if not for ever, as Herbert Spencer believes, at least for a very long time among certain inferior races, protected and at the same time oppressed by climates which the civilised man cannot brave with impunity. These backward prehistoric races will continue to subsist in unwholesome regions, as witnesses of a distant past, recalling to more developed races their humble origin. But with these last the form of marriage and of the family, which has incessantly been evolving, cannot evidently remain immutable in the future. The little human world knows no more repose than the cosmic environment from whence it has sprung, and which encloses it. Among peoples, as among individuals, vital concurrence and selection do their work. Now, when it is a matter of institutions so essentially vital as marriage and the family, the least amelioration is of the highest importance; it has an influence on the number and quality of fresh generations, and on the flesh and spirit of peoples. All things being equal, the preponderance, whether pacific or not, will always fall to the nations which produce the greatest number of the most robust, most intelligent, and best citizens. These better endowed nations will often absorb or replace the others, and always in the long run will be docilely imitated by them. Ethnography and history show us the true sense of evolution in the past. Societies have constantly advanced from confusion to distinction. Monogamic marriage has succeeded to various more confused modes of sexual association. So also the family is the ultimate residuum of vast communities of ill-defined relationships. In its turn, the family itself has become restricted. At first it was still a sort of little clan; and then it was reduced to be essentially no more than the very modest group formed by the father, the mother, and the children. At the same time the familial patrimony crumbled, just as that of the clan had been previously parcelled out; it became individual. What is reserved for us in the future? Will the family be reconstituted by a slow movement of retrogression, as Herbert Spencer believes?[1123] Nothing is less probable.

Institutions have this in common with rivers, that they do not easily flow back towards their source. If they sometimes seem to retrograde, it is generally a mere appearance, resulting from a sort of sociologic rhythm. In truth, the end and the beginning may assume a superficial analogy, masking a profound difference. Thus the unconscious atheism of the Kaffirs has nothing in common with that of Lucretius, and nothing can be less analogous than the anarchic equality of the Fuegians and American individualism. If, as is probable, the individualist evolution, already so long begun, continues in the future, the civilised family—that is to say, the last collective unit of societies—must again be disintegrated, and finally subsist no longer except in genealogy scientifically registered with ever-increasing care; for it is, and always will be, important to be able to prejudge how “the voice of the ancestors” may speak in the individual. But even from the crumbling of the family will result the reconstitution of a larger collective unit, having common interests and resuscitating under another form that solidarity without which no society can endure.

But this new collectivity will in no way be copied from the primitive clan. Whether it be called State, district, canton, or commune, its government will be at once despotic and liberal; it will repress everything that would be calculated to injure the community, but in everything else it will endeavour to leave the most complete independence to individuals. Our actual family circle is most often very imperfect; so few families can give, or know how to give, a healthy, physical, moral, and intellectual education to the child, that in this domain large encroachments of the State, whether small or great, are probable, even desirable. There is, in fact, a great social interest before which the pretended rights of families must be effaced. In order to prosper and live, it is necessary that the ethnic or social unit should incessantly produce a sufficient number of individuals well endowed in body, heart, and mind. Before this primordial need all prejudices must yield, all egoistic interests must bend.

But the family and marriage are closely connected; the former cannot be modified so long as the latter remains unchanged. If the legal ties of the family are stretched, while social ties are drawn closer, marriage will have the same fortune. For a long time, more or less silently, a slow work of disintegration has begun, and we see it accentuated every day. Leaving aside morals, which are difficult to appreciate, let us simply take the numerical results which statistics furnish us with in regard to divorce and illegitimate births.

In the five countries compared as follows, the increase of divorces has been continuous and progressive during thirty years, and in France the number has doubled.

The number of illegitimate births followed simultaneously an analogous progression. In France, during the period 1800-1805, it was 4.75 per 100; now, wrote M. Block in 1869, it has gradually risen to 7.25 per 100.[1124] At the same time, and as a consequence of this demographic movement, the proportion of free unions has considerably increased.

INCREASE OF DIVORCES.[1125]

The frequency of divorces in 1851-55 being 100, what has it become during the following years?

A. Bertillon calculated this proportion for Paris at about a tenth. But these results are simply the logical continuation of the evolution of marriage. It is in the sense of an ever-increasing individual liberty, especially for woman, that this evolution is being effected. Between men and women the conjugal relations have at first been nearly everywhere from masters to slaves; then marital despotism became slowly attenuated, and at Rome, for example, where the gradual metamorphosis may be traced during a long historic period, the power of the paterfamilias, which at first had no limit, at length became curbed; the personality of the woman was more and more accentuated, and the rigid marriage of the first centuries of the Republic was replaced under the Empire by a sort of free union. Doubtless this movement necessarily retrograded under the influence of Christianity; but, as always happens in the logic of things, it has, nevertheless, resumed its course; it will become more and more evident, and will surely pass the point at which it stopped in imperial Rome.

Monogamic marriage will continue to subsist; it is the last-comer, and much the most worthy, and besides, the balance of the sexes makes it almost a necessity; but it will have more and more equality in it, and less and less of legal restraint. On this point I am glad to find myself in accord with the most celebrated of modern sociologists, Herbert Spencer, who is not very bold, however, on these delicate points. “In primitive phases,” he says, “while permanent monogamy was developing, union in the name of the law—that is, originally, the act of purchase—was accounted the essential part of the marriage, and union in the name of affection was not essential. In the present day union in the name of the law is considered the most important, and union by affection as less important. A time will come when union by affection will be considered the most important, and union in the name of the law the least important, and men will hold in reprobation those conjugal unions in which union by affection is dissolved.”[1126] Montaigne once wrote: “We have thought to make our marriage tie stronger by taking away all means of dissolving it; but the more we have tightened the constraint, so much the more have we relaxed and detracted from the bond of will and affection.”[1127]

It is therefore probable that a future more or less distant will inaugurate the régime of monogamic unions, freely contracted, and, at need, freely dissolved by simple mutual consent, as is already the case with divorces in various European countries—at Geneva, in Belgium, in Roumania, etc., and with separation in Italy. In these divorces of the future, the community will only intervene in order to safeguard that which is of vital interest to it—the fate and the education of the children. But this evolution in the manner of understanding and practising marriage will operate slowly, for it supposes an entire corresponding revolution in public opinion; moreover, it requires as a corollary, profound modifications in the social organism. The régime of liberty in marriage and the disintegration of our actual familial type are only possible on condition that the State or the district, in a great number of cases, is ready to assume the rôle of guardian and educator of children; but, before it can take on itself these important functions, it must have considerable resources at its disposal which to-day are wanting. In our present régime, the family, however defective it may be, still constitutes the safest, and almost the only shelter for the child, and we cannot think of destroying this shelter before we have constructed a larger and better one.

Transformations so radical as these cannot evidently be wrought instantaneously, by a mere change of view, after the fashion of political revolutions. Nothing is more chimerical than to fear or to hope for the sudden destruction of our actual forms of marriage, of the family, and of property; but there is no doubt that all this is tottering. The alarm and the lamentations of so many moralists, both lay and religious, are not therefore without some foundation. Societies have always evolved, but the rapidity of this evolution is accelerating; it is, in some sort, proportionate to the square of the time elapsed. I fear that in the eyes of our descendants we shall appear slaves of routine, as our ancestors are in ours.

For those who have not firmly rallied to the side of the great law of progress, the future is full of terror. It has always been thus; the apostles of progress have always had to overcome the resistance of the sectaries of the past. From time immemorial, certain Dyak tribes were accustomed to fell trees by chopping at the trunk with a hatchet, perpendicularly to the fibres. One day some revolutionaries proposed making V-shaped cuttings, in the European method. The Dyak conservative party, inspired by the regard due to custom, were wroth at this, and punished the innovators by a fine.[1128] Nevertheless, I do not doubt that the new method has triumphed in practice; it was found advantageous. But this incident is, in miniature, the history of all transformations, small or great.

It is very certain that in societies where marriage by groups half polyandric and half polygamic had been instituted for centuries, the bold agitators who attempted to substitute individual union were considered at first as dangerous revolutionaries, and those who dismembered into families the communal clan only succeeded at the cost of great difficulty and peril. Thus in the Oresteia of Æschylus, of which I have spoken in the last chapter, the chorus of the Eumenides gives voice to the protestations of public opinion against the establishment of the paternal family in Greece. The prospects which alarm the conservative spirits of to-day are, in truth, but the last consequence of that ancient evolution. Statisticians who are not evolutionists prove, without understanding it, that the indissolubility of marriage becomes more and more intolerable for individuals.[1129]There is, as it were, a tide of discord continually rising which renders conjugal stability more and more precarious. This grievous state of things distresses, on the other hand, the moralists, for neither do they see the reason of it. The surprise of the former is not more justified than the lamentation of the latter. It is nothing more than the future, which, with its habitual effrontery, persists in rising out of the past. The faint-hearted cry to us that everything is coming to an end. It is not so; on the contrary, everything is about to be renewed. From the most distant stone age, the history of humanity has only been a long series of regenerations. Far from mourning when the world seems to be entering a period of fresh life, let us rather rejoice and say again with Lucretius—

“Cedit enim rerum novitate extrusa vetustas
 Semper et ex aliis aliud reparare necesse est.”