ue that in some
cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so
regardless of marriage, and not because of it.

On the other hand, it is utterly false that love results from marriage.
On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple
falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be
found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable. Certainly the
growing-used to each other is far away from the spontaneity, the
intensity, and beauty of love, without which the intimacy of marriage
must prove degrading to both the woman and the man.

Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It
differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is
more binding, more exacting. Its returns are insignificantly small
compared with the investments. In taking out an insurance policy one
pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue
payments. If, however, woman's premium is a husband, she pays for it
with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, "until
death doth part." Moreover, the marriage insurance condemns her to
life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual
as well as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his sphere is wider,
marriage does not limit him as much as woman. He feels his chains more
in an economic sense.

Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage.
"Ye who enter here leave all hope behind."

That marriage is a failure none but the very stupid will deny. One has
but to glance over the statistics of divorce to realize how bitter a
failure marriage really is. Nor will the stereotyped Philistine argument
that the laxity of divorce laws and the growing looseness of woman
account for the fact that: first, every twelfth marriage ends in
divorce; second, that since 1870 divorces have increased from 28 to 73
for every hundred thousand population; third, that adultery, since 1867,
as ground for divorce, has increased 270.8 per cent.; fourth, that
desertion increased 369.8 per cent.

Added to these startling figures is a vast amount of material, dramatic
and literary, further elucidating this subject. Robert Herrick, in
_Together_; Pinero, in _Mid-Channel_; Eugene Walter, in _Paid in Full_,
and scores of other writers are discussing the barrenness, the monotony,
the sordidness, the inadequacy of marriage as a factor for harmony and
understandin