een them
and their children to ensure the health and education of the latter,
then we open at once the whole question of a terminating agreement.
Marriage ceases to be an unlimited union and becomes a definite
contract. We raise the whole question of "What are the limits in
marriage, and how and when may a marriage terminate?"

Now, many answers are being given to that question at the present time.
We may take as the extremest opposite to the eternal marriage idea the
proposal of Mr. Bernard Shaw, that marriage should be terminable at the
instance of either party. You would give due and public notice that your
marriage was at an end, and it would be at an end. This is marriage at
its minimum, as the eternal indissoluble marriage is marriage at its
maximum, and the only conceivable next step would be to have a marriage
makeable by the oral declaration of both parties and terminable by the
oral declaration of either, which would be, indeed, no marriage at all,
but an encounter. You might marry a dozen times in that way in a day....
Somewhere between these extremes lies the marriage law of a civilised
state. Let us, rather than working down from the eternal marriage of
the religious idealists, work up from Mr. Shaw. The former course is,
perhaps, inevitable for the legislator, but the latter is much more
convenient for our discussion.

Now, the idea of a divorce so easy and wilful as Mr. Shaw proposes
arises naturally out of an exclusive consideration of what I may call
the amorous sentimentalities of marriage. If you regard marriage as
merely the union of two people in love, then, clearly, it is
intolerable, an outrage upon human dignity, that they should remain
intimately united when either ceases to love. And in that world of Mr.
Shaw's dreams, in which everybody is to have an equal income and nobody
is to have children, in that culminating conversazione of humanity, his
marriage law will, no doubt, work with the most admirable results. But
if we make a step towards reality and consider a world in which incomes
are unequal, and economic difficulties abound--for the present we will
ignore the complication of offspring--we at once find it necessary to
modify the first fine simplicity of divorce at either partner's request.
Marriage is almost always a serious economic disturbance for both man
and woman: work has to be given up and rearranged, resources have to be
pooled; only in the rarest cases does it escape becoming an