Page:The Marriage Laws of Soviet Russia (1921).pdf/10

 old order. Such survivals are inevitable at this time when neither the economic nor the psychological transformation is complete. There are provisions respecting property and income which will inevitably be subject to obsolescence or amendment. The law of guardianship, essentially revolutionary as it is, is yet no more than a first tentative approach to the realization of collective responsibility for the care of the young. The laws of marriage and divorce still bear traces of the passing order, frank and sensible acknowledgment of the existence of certain economic and psychological conditions only to be overcome when the complete change is accomplished.

The case of the marriage laws affords an excellent illustration of the peculiar problem which confronted the Russian proletariat, and of the method in which that problem was met. Certain critics have come forward to argue that there is nothing very revolutionary in substituting registration by the civil authorities for the religious ceremony. Why abolish the church marriage only to substitute a state marriage? The answer is that this present marriage law is at once the most revolutionary and the most socialistic which could be devised to meet the special circumstances. The alternative would have been to have abolished the religious ceremony as a legal requirement and to. have omitted the civil contract. But this would have left marriage merely where it was before, in the hands of the church, the prey of ancient superstitions and clerical domination. On the other hand, by substituting civil registration for the religious ceremony as the required form, a formidable blow was struck at