individual inclination, but by family interests.

In the overwhelming majority of cases the marriage contract thus
remained to the end of the middle ages what it had been from the outset:
a matter that was not decided by the parties most interested. In the
beginning one was already married from his birth--married to a whole
group of the other sex. In the later forms of group marriage, a similar
relation was probably maintained, only under a continual narrowing of
the group. In the pairing family it is the rule for mothers to exchange
mutual pledges for the marriage of their children. Here also the main
consideration is given to new ties of relationship that will strengthen
the position of the young couple in the gens and the tribe. And when
with the preponderance of private property over collective property and
with the interest for inheritance paternal law and monogamy assumed the
supremacy, then marriage became still more dependent on economic
considerations. The form of purchase marriage disappears, but the
essence of the transaction is more and more intensified, so that not
only the woman, but also the man have a fixed price--not according to
his qualities, but to his wealth. That mutual fondness of the marrying
parties should be the one factor dominating all others had always been
unheard of in the practice of the ruling classes. Such a thing occurred
at best in romances or--among the oppressed classes that were not
counted.

This was the situation encountered by capitalist production when it
began to prepare, since the epoch of geographical discoveries, for the
conquest of the world by international trade and manufacture. One would
think that this mode of making the marriage contract would have been
extremely acceptable to capitalism, and it was. And yet--the irony of
fate is inexplicable--capitalist production had to make the decisive
breach through this mode. By changing all things into commodities, it
dissolved all inherited and traditional relations and replaced time
hallowed custom and historical right by purchase and sale, by the "free
contract." And the English jurist, H. S. Maine, thought he had made a
stupendous discovery by saying that our whole progress over former
epochs consisted in arriving from status to contract, from inherited to
voluntarily contracted conditions. So far as this is correct, it had
already been mentioned in the Communist Manifesto.

But in order to make contracts, people must hav