compatible with perfect grace and beauty; it
diminishes the sum of active energy. It exerts, in short, the
same kind of influence on physical responsibility as formal
marriage on moral responsibility.

It is too often forgotten, and must therefore be repeated, that
married people do not remain together because of any religious or
legal tie; that tie is merely the historical outcome of their
natural tendency to remain together, a tendency which is itself
far older than history. "Love would exist in the world to-day,
just as pure and just as enduring," says Shufeldt (_Medico-Legal
Journal_, Dec., 1897), "had man never invented 'marriage.' Truly
affined mates would have remained faithful to each other as long
as life lasted. It is only when men attempt to improve upon
nature that crime, disease, and unhappiness step in." "The
abolition of marriage in the form now practiced," wrote Godwin
more than a century ago (_Political Justice_, second edition,
1796, vol. i, p. 248), "will be attended with no evils. We are
apt to represent it to ourselves as the harbinger of brutal lust
and depravity. But it really happens in this, as in other cases,
that the positive laws which are made to restrain our vices
irritate and multiply them." And Professor Lester Ward, in
insisting on the strength of the monogamic sentiment in modern
society, truly remarks (_International Journal of Ethics_, Oct.,
1896) that the rebellion against rigid marriage bonds "is, in
reality, due to the very strengthening of the true bonds of
conjugal affection, coupled with a rational and altogether proper
determination on the part of individuals to accept, in so
important a matter, nothing less than the genuine article." "If
by a single stroke," says Professor Woods Hutchinson
(_Contemporary Review_, Sept., 1905), "all marriage ties now in
existence were struck off or declared illegal, eight-tenths of
all couples would be remarried within forty eight hours, and
seven-tenths could not be kept asunder with bayonets." An
experiment of this kind on a small scale was witnessed in 1909 in
an English village in Buckinghamshire. It was found that the
parish church had never been licensed for marriages, and that in
consequence all the people who had gone through the ceremony of
marriage in that church during the previous half