ints necessarily
involves a reaction to the opposite extreme of license; a slave is not
changed at a stroke into an autonomous freeman. Yet we have to remember
that the marriage order existed for millenniums before any attempt was
made to mould it into arbitrary shapes by human legislation. Such
legislation, we have seen, was indeed the effort of the human spirit to
affirm more emphatically the demands of its own instincts.[365] But its
final result is to choke and impede rather than to further the instincts
which inspired it. Its gradual disappearance allows the natural order free
and proper scope.

The great truth that compulsion is not really a force on the side
of virtue, but on the side of vice, had been clearly realized by
the genius of Rabelais, when he said of his ideal social state,
the Abbey of Thelema, that there was but one clause in its rule:
Fay ce que vouldras. "Because," said Rabelais (Bk. i, Ch. VII),
"men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in
honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that
prompts them unto virtuous actions and withdraws them from vice.
These same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are
brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble
disposition by which they freely were inclined to virtue, to
shake off and break that bond of servitude." So that when a man
and a woman who had lived under the rule of Thelema married each
other, Rabelais tells us, their mutual love lasted undiminished
to the day of their death.

When the loss of autonomous freedom fails to lead to licentious
rebellion it incurs the opposite risk and tends to become a
flabby reliance on an external support. The artificial support of
marriage by State regulation then resembles the artificial
support of the body furnished by corset-wearing. The reasons for
and against adopting artificial support are the same in one case
as the other. Corsets really give a feeling of support; they
really furnish without trouble a fairly satisfactory appearance
of decorum; they are a real protection against various accidents.
But the price at which they furnish these advantages is serious,
and the advantages themselves only exist under unnatural
conditions. The corset cramps the form and the healthy
development of the organs; it enfeebles the voluntary muscular
system; it is in