and after these preliminaries we must proceed to ask, first, what will be the utopian marriage law, and then what sort of customs and opinions are likely to be superadded to that law?
the trend of our reasoning has brought us to the conclusion that the utopian state will feel justified in intervening between men and women on two accounts, first on account of paternity, and secondly on account of the clash of freedoms that may otherwise arise. the utopian state will effectually interfere with and prescribe conditions for all sorts of contract, and for this sort of contract in particular it will be in agreement with almost every earthly state, in defining in the completest fashion what things a man or woman may be bound to do, and what they cannot be bound to do. from the point of view of a statesman, marriage is the union of a man and woman in a manner so intimate as to involve the probability of offspring, and it is of primary importance to the state, first in order to secure good births, and secondly good home conditions, that these unions should not be free, nor promiscuous, nor practically universal throughout the adult population.
prolific marriage must be a profitable privilege. it must occur only under certain obvious conditions, the contracting parties must be in health and condition, free from specific transmissible taints, above a certain minimum age, and sufficiently intelligent and energetic to have acquired a minimum education. the man at least must be in receipt of a net income above the minimum wage, after any outstanding charges against him have been paid. all this much it is surely reasonable to insist upon before the state becomes responsible for the prospective children. the age at which men and women may contract to marry is difficult to determine. but if we are, as far as possible, to put women on an equality with men, if we are to insist upon a universally educated population, and if we are seeking to reduce the infantile death-rate to zero, it must be much higher than it is in any terrestrial state. the woman should be at least one-and-twenty; the man twenty-six or twenty-seven.
one imagines the parties to a projected marriage first obtaining licenses which will testify that these conditions are satisfied. from the point of view of the theoretical utopian state, these licenses are the feature of primary importance. then, no doubt, that universal register at paris would come into play. as a matter of justice, there must be no deception between the two people, and the state will ensure that in certain broad essentials this is so. they would have to communicate their joint intention to a public office after their personal licenses were granted, and each would be supplied with a copy of the index card of the projected mate, on which would be recorded his or her age, previous marriages, legally important diseases, offspring, domiciles, public appointments, criminal convictions, registered assignments of property, and so forth. possibly it might be advisable to have a little ceremony for each party, for each in the absence of the other, in which this record could be read over in the presence of witnesses, together with some prescribed form of address of counsel in the matter. there would then be a reasonable interval for consideration and withdrawal on the part of either spouse. in the event of the two people persisting in their resolution, they would after this minimum interval signify as much to the local official and the necessary entry would be made in the registers. these formalities would be quite independent of any religious ceremonial the contracting parties might choose, for with religious belief and procedure the modern state has no concern.
so much for the preliminary conditions of matrimony. for those men and women who chose to ignore these conditions and to achieve any sort of union they liked the state would have no concern, unless offspring were born illegitimately. in that case, as we have already suggested, it would be only reasonable to make the parents chargeable with every duty, with maintenance, education, and so forth, that in the normal course of things would fall to the state. it would be necessary to impose a life assurance payment upon these parents, and to exact effectual guarantees against every possible evasion of the responsibility they had incurred. but the further control of private morality, beyond the protection of the immature from corruption and evil example, will be no concern of the state’s. when a child comes in, the future of the species comes in; and the state comes in as the guardian of interests wider than the individual’s; but the adult’s private life is the entirely private life into which the state may not intrude.
now what will be the nature of the utopian contract of matrimony?
from the first of the two points of view named above, that of parentage, it is obvious that one unavoidable condition will be the chastity of the wife. her infidelity being demonstrated, must at once terminate the marriage and release both her husband and the state from any liability for the support of her illegitimate offspring. that, at any rate, is beyond controversy; a marriage contract that does not involve that, is a triumph of metaphysics over common sense. it will be obvious that under utopian conditions it is the state that will suffer injury by a wife’s misconduct, and that a husband who condones anything of the sort will participate in her offence. a woman, therefore, who is divorced on this account will be divorced as a public offender, and not in the key of a personal quarrel; not as one who has inflicted a private and personal wrong. this, too, lies within the primary implications of marriage.
beyond that, what conditions should a marriage contract in utopia involve?
a reciprocal restraint on the part of the husband is clearly of no importance whatever, so far as the first end of matrimony goes, the protection of the community from inferior births. it is no wrong to the state. but it does carry with it a variable amount of emotional offence to the wife; it may wound her pride and cause her violent perturbations of jealousy; it may lead to her neglect, her solitude and unhappiness, and it may even work to her physical injury. there should be an implication that it is not to occur. she has bound herself to the man for the good of the state, and clearly it is reasonable that she should look to the state for relief if it does occur. the extent of the offence given her is the exact measure of her injury; if she does not mind nobody minds, and if her self-respect does not suffer nothing whatever is lost to the world; and so it should rest with her to establish his misconduct, and, if she thinks fit, to terminate the marriage.
a failure on either side to perform the elementary duties of companionship, desertion, for example, should obviously give the other mate the right to relief, and clearly the development of any disqualifying habit, drunkenness, or drug-taking, or the like, or any serious crime or acts of violence, should give grounds for a final release. moreover, the modern utopian state intervenes between the sexes only because of the coming generation, and for it to sustain restrictions upon conduct in a continually fruitless marriage is obviously to lapse into purely moral intervention. it seems reasonable, therefore, to set a term to a marriage that remains childless, to let it expire at the end of three or four or five unfruitful years, but with no restriction upon the right of the husband and wife to marry each other again.
these are the fairly easy primaries of this question. we now come to the more difficult issues of the matter. the first of these is the question of the economic relationships of husband and wife, having regard to the fact that even in utopia women, at least until they become mothers, are likely to be on the average poorer than men. the second is the question of the duration of a marriage. but the two interlock, and are, perhaps, best treated together in one common section. and they both ramify in the most complicated manner into the consideration of the general morale of the community.
