eserve the institutions of wedlock and the family. The
pursuit of happiness, either in the acquisition of property or in the
enjoyment of family life, is only possible in submission to laws which
define social order, rights, and duties, and against which the
individual must react at every point. It is the mores which constantly
revise and readjust the laws of social order, and so define the social
conditions within which self-realization must go on.

+397. Refusal of remarriage.+ The laws of every State in the United
States, except South Carolina, allow marriage by a minister of religion
or by magistrates. This does not mean that the legislatures meant to
endow ministers of religion with authority to say who may marry and who
may not. Ministers who agree not to marry divorced persons assume
authority which does not belong to them. In England, with an established
church, the fact has recently been ascertained that a clergyman cannot
refuse to marry persons who may marry by the civil law as it stands.
With us the number of sects and denominations is such that no hardship
arises if one sect chooses to adopt stricter laws for the sake of making
a demonstration or exercising educational influence, and decides to run
the risk of driving its own members to other sects. What the next result
of such action will be remains to be learned.

+398. Child marriage.+ Child marriage illustrates a number of points in
regard to the mores, especially the possibility of perversity and
aberration. Wilutzky[1262] thinks that child marriage amongst savages
began in the desire of a man to get a wife to himself (monandry) out of
the primitive communalism, without violating the customs of ancestors.
Girls of ten or twelve years are married to men of twenty-five or thirty
on the New Britain Islands. The missionary says, "The result of such an
early union, for the girl, has been dreadful."[1263] On Malekula girls
are married at six or eight.[1264] Similar cases are reported from
Central and South America where girls of ten are mothers.[1265] Rohlfs
reports mothers of ten or twelve at Fesan.[1266] The Eskimo practice
child betrothal, so that wedlock begins at once at puberty.[1267]
Schwaner reports,[1268] from the Barito Valley, that children are often
betrothed and married by the fathers when the latter are intoxicated.
The motives of the match are birth, kinship, property, and social
position, and the marriage is hastened, lest the parents should