ial in marriage. But marriage does not thereupon cease to be so
economical, convenient, and comfortable, that the Superman might safely
bribe the matrimonomaniacs by offering to revive all the old inhuman
stringency and irrevocability of marriage, to abolish divorce, to
confirm the horrible bond which still chains decent people to drunkards,
criminals, and wasters, provided only the complete extrication of
conjugation from it were conceded to him. For if people could form
domestic companionships on no easier terms than these, they would still
marry. The Roman Catholic, forbidden by his Church to avail himself of
the divorce laws, marries as freely as the South Dakotan Presbyterians
who can change partners with a facility that scandalizes the old world;
and were his Church to dare a further step towards Christianity and
enjoin celibacy on its laity as well as on its clergy, marriages would
still be contracted for the sake of domesticity by perfectly obedient
sons and daughters of the Church. One need not further pursue these
hypotheses: they are only suggested here to help the reader to analyse
marriage into its two functions of regulating conjugation and supplying
a form of domesticity. These two functions are quite separable; and
domesticity is the only one of the two which is essential to the
existence of marriage, because conjugation without domesticity is not
marriage at all, whereas domesticity without conjugation is still
marriage: in fact it is necessarily the actual condition of all fertile
marriages during a great part of their duration, and of some marriages
during the whole of it.

Taking it, then, that Property and Marriage, by destroying Equality and
thus hampering sexual selection with irrelevant conditions, are hostile
to the evolution of the Superman, it is easy to understand why the only
generally known modern experiment in breeding the human race took place
in a community which discarded both institutions.

III

THE PERFECTIONIST EXPERIMENT AT ONEIDA CREEK

In 1848 the Oneida Community was founded in America to carry out a
resolution arrived at by a handful of Perfectionist Communists "that we
will devote ourselves exclusively to the establishment of the Kingdom of
God." Though the American nation declared that this sort of thing was
not to be tolerated in a Christian country, the Oneida Community held
its own for over thirty years, during which period it seems to have
produced healthier