Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/139

Rh longer have anything personally to do with each other, any more than other people who have no personal relation to each other. It is as though they had never known each other; yes, as though they had always hated each other. What reasonable ground, therefore, can there still be to keep them together, and what reasonable object can there be in such bondage?

To sanctify marriage, or to attempt to fetter it by means of a contract, is to thoroughly misconceive its nature, and to attempt in a roundabout way to force the very opposite of its aim. If marriage were a contract, the marriage relation, as already observed, would have to be the result of the contract; but the exact opposite is the case: the marriage relation already exists through love, before that which is called the contract is created by the marriage ceremony, etc.

If married persons wish to enter a contract, with regard to their economic relations for instance, let them do so as persons; as a married couple they cannot do it. Two lovers, for instance, who wish to live together, that is, to be married, bind themselves by contract to divide equally their common property in case of an eventual separation. Such a contract has nothing in the least to do with the real marriage; on the contrary, it appertains to a time when the marriage has ceased, and regulates in that case the external affairs of the once-married couple. But