aking each other happy or miserable with which no public
coercion can deal. If a marriage could be dissolved every morning it
would not give back his night's rest to a man kept awake by a curtain
lecture; and what is the good of giving a man a lot of power where he
only wants a little peace? The child must depend on the most imperfect
mother; the mother may be devoted to the most unworthy children; in such
relations legal revenges are vain. Even in the abnormal cases where
the law may operate, this difficulty is constantly found; as many a
bewildered magistrate knows. He has to save children from starvation by
taking away their breadwinner. And he often has to break a wife's heart
because her husband has already broken her head. The State has no tool
delicate enough to deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affections
of the family; the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued
together too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in
between them. The man and the woman are one flesh--yes, even when they
are not one spirit. Man is a quadruped. Upon this ancient and anarchic
intimacy, types of government have little or no effect; it is happy or
unhappy, by its own sexual wholesomeness and genial habit, under the
republic of Switzerland or the despotism of Siam. Even a republic in
Siam would not have done much towards freeing the Siamese Twins.

The problem is not in marriage, but in sex; and would be felt under the
freest concubinage. Nevertheless, the overwhelming mass of mankind has
not believed in freedom in this matter, but rather in a more or less
lasting tie. Tribes and civilizations differ about the occasions on
which we may loosen the bond, but they all agree that there is a bond to
be loosened, not a mere universal detachment. For the purposes of this
book I am not concerned to discuss that mystical view of marriage in
which I myself believe: the great European tradition which has made
marriage a sacrament. It is enough to say here that heathen and
Christian alike have regarded marriage as a tie; a thing not normally
to be sundered. Briefly, this human belief in a sexual bond rests on a
principle of which the modern mind has made a very inadequate study. It
is, perhaps, most nearly paralleled by the principle of the second wind
in walking.

The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every
pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so
that the pleasu