Is Marriage a Failure? 611 The nearer he approaches to the cradle and the more frequently, the happier for him and for his home and for the state. Habits of impurity will seem more loathsome in that presence than anywhere else upon the earth. The loftiest chivalry of which the strongest can be capable comes as a sequel of their service to the weakest. When the White Cross gospel shall have been embosomed in young manhood's life for one blessed generation, the sanctities of fatherhood shall be seen to exceed all others to which a manly spirit can attain in this state of existence, and the malarious dream of wicked self-indulgence shall slowly but surely give place to the sacred self-restraint which waits to crown with all good fairies' gifts the little life which noble love alone may dare invoke. IS MARRIAGE A FAILURE? With all its faults, and they are many, I believe the present marriage system to be the greatest triumph of Christianity, and that it has created and conserves more happy homes than the world has ever before known. Any law that renders less binding the mutual, life-long loyalty of one man and one woman to each other, which is the central idea of every home, is an unmitigated curse to that man and woman, to that home and to humanity. Around this union, which alone renders possible a pure society and a permanent state, the law should build its utmost safeguards, and upon this union the Gospel should pronounce its most sacred benedictions. But, while I hold these truths to be self-evident, I believe that a constant evolution is going forward in the home as in every other place, and that we have but dimly dreamed the good in store for those whom God for holiest love hath made. In the nature of the case, the most that even Christianity itself could do at first, though it is the strongest force ever let loose upon the planet, was to separate one man and woman from the common herd into each home, telling the woman to remain therein with grateful quietness, while the man stood at the door to defend its sacred shrine with fist and spear, to insist upon its rights of property, and to stand for it in the state. 66 Thus, under the conditions of a civilization crude and material, grew up that well-worn maxim of the common law : Husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband." But this 612 Many Men are Good and Gracious." supreme power brought to the man supreme temptations. By the laws of mind he legislated first for himself and afterward for the physically weaker one within "his" home. The femme couverte is not a character appropriate to our peaceful, homelike communities, although she may have been and doubtless was a necessary figure in the days when women were safe only as they were shut up in castles and when they were the booty chiefly sought in war. To-day a woman may circumnavigate the world alone and yet be unmolested. Twenty years ago when I was traveling in Palestine, a lady of wealth made the trip, tenting by herself and escorted only by a dragoman, as was our own party of ten men and three women. A recent book, the name of which I have forgotten, gives a piquant account of the journey made by a party of American ladies in Africa, and nothing is more common than the European rambles of newly-fledged collegians of the gentler sex. Our marriage laws and customs are changing to meet these new conditions. It will not do to give the husband of the modern woman power to whip his wife, provided that the stick he uses must not be larger than his finger; to give him the right to will away her unborn child; to have control over her property; and, in the state, to make all the laws under which she is to live, adjudicate all her penalties, try her before juries of men, conduct her to prison under the care of men, cast the ballot for her, and in general hold her in the estate of a perpetual minor. It will not do to let the modern man determine the “ age of consent," settle the penalties that men shall suffer whose indignities and outrages toward women are worse to their victims than death, and by his exclusive power to make all laws and choose all officers, judicial and executive, to have his own case wholly in his own hands. To continue this method is to make it as hard as possible for men to do right, and as easy as possible for them to do wrong, the magnificent possibilities of manly character being best prophesied from the fact that under such a system so many men are good and gracious. My theory of marriage in its relation to society would give this postulate: Husband and wife are one, and that one is— husband and wife. I believe they will never come to the heights of purity, of power and peace, for which they were designed in heaven, until this better law prevails: The New Régime. "Two heads in council, two beside the hearth, Two plummets dropt for one to sound the abyss 613 Poets are prophets, and the greatest poet of our time has set humanity's great goal before us, only to be gained "When reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm." One-half the world for the wife-an undivided half apiece for wife and husband; co-education to mate them on the plane of mind, equal property rights to make her God's own free woman, not coerced into marriage for the sake of a support, nor a bondslave after she is married, who asks her master for the price of a paper of pins and gives him back the change, or, if a petted favorite, owing her lease of purse wholly to his will and never to her right; free to go her honored and self-respecting way as a maiden in perpetuo rather than marry a man whose deterioration through the alcohol and nicotine habits is a menace to herself and the descendants that such a marriage must have invokedthese are the outlooks of the future that shall make the marriage system, never a failure since it became monogamic, an assured, a permanent, a paradisiacal success. In that day the wife shall surrender at marriage no right not equally surrendered by the husband-not even her own name. Emile Girardin, that keen-sighted writer of France, says that it is so much easier, for obvious reasons, to trace ancestry along the mother's line, that historic records have incalculably suffered by the arbitrary relinquishment of her name. Probably the French have hit upon the best expedient, the union of the two. Thus I recall that in Paris my home was with an accomplished lady whose maiden name was Farjon, and whose husband's was Perrot, her visiting-card bearing the inscription, "Madame Eglantine Perrot-Farjon." The growing custom, in this country at least, to give the mother's name to a son or daughter indicates the increasing, though perhaps unconscious, recognition of woman as an equal partner in the marriage sacrament and compact. But the tendency, even among men of intelligence, to sign themselves 614 The Magnum Opus of Christianity. "John Jones, wife, child and nurse," as we see it in the registers of fashionable hotels, is a frequent reminder of the pit from which wives are slowly being digged. The man who writes "Mr. John and Mrs. Jane Jones," may be regarded as well on the road to a successful evolution! although "Mr. and Mrs. John Jones" is about the correct thing up to this date. The time will come when the mother's custody of children will constructively be preferred in law to that of the father, on the ground that in a Christian civilization it is safer and more consonant with natural laws. Last of all and chiefest, the magnum opus of Christianity, and Science, which is its handmaid, the wife will have undoubted custody of herself, and, as in all the lower ranges of the animal creation, she will determine the frequency of the investiture of life with form and of love with immortality. My library groans under accumulations of books written by men to teach women the immeasurable iniquity of arresting development in the genesis of a new life, but not one of these volumes contains the remotest suggestion that this responsibility should be at least equally divided between himself and herself. The untold horrors of this injustice dwarf all others out of sight, and the most hopeless feature of it is the utter unconsciousness with which it is committed. But better days are dawning; the study by women of heredity and prenatal influences is flooding with light the Via Dolorosa of the past; and the White Cross army with its equal standard of purity for men and women is moving to its rightful place of leadership among the hosts of men. I believe in uniform national marriage laws, in divorce for one cause only, in legal separation on account of drunkenness, but I would elevate and guard the marriage tie by every guarantee that could make it at the top of society, the most coveted estate of the largest-natured and most endowed, rather than at the bottom, the necessary refuge of the smallest-natured and most dependent woman. Besides all this, in the interest of men, i. e., that their incentives to the best life may be raised to the highest power, I would make women so independent of marriage that men who, by bad habits and niggardly estate, whether physical, mental, or inoral, were least adapted to help build a race of human angels, should find the facility with which they now enter its hallowed precincts reduced to the lowest minimum. General Conferences. THE LAW OF KINDNESS. 615 I am proud to belong to the Universal Peace Union, and the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and to echo every word uttered by Frances Power Cobbe of England, and George T. Angell of America, those brave defenders of the gentle faith that "Nothing is inexorable but love," and that we are "Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels." My shepherd collie, "Prohibition" ("Hibbie," for short, and "Hib," for shorter), is a perpetual gospel to me as he reaches out his shaggy paw with a wise look in his eyes that seem to say, "Have patience with me and it shall grow to be a hand.” MY EXPERIENCE WITH GENERAL CONFERENCES. I have seen three of these courts. The first was in Chicago. in 1868, when, dressed in my spick-and-span new traveling suit for Europe, I glanced in through the crowded door of Clark Street Church, where a tremendous debate was going on about lay delegation; but it was nearly time for my train to New York, and this glance was all I had. The next was in 1880 in Pike's Opera House at Cincinnati. Our National W. C. T. U. had sent a message that year to all the leading ecclesiastical assemblages, respectfully asking for a friendly word from them, and suggesting that they appoint representatives who should attend our National Convention to see what we were doing and bring us words of cheer. In our simplicity, we thought it the most natural thing imaginable thus to bring the work we loved back to the church that had nurtured us and given us our inspiration, and we thoroughly believe that history will declare not only that our purpose was true and good, but that our plan was altogether reasonable. One would have thought, however, that something revolutionary had been proposed, when it was known that my friend, Miss F. Jennie Duty, of Cleveland, and myself were in the Opera House desirous of presenting this message! Grave, dignified clergymen who had |