Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/140

124 as long as the marriage continues, it has as little efficacy as there is need for it; for marriage is love in action, and that presupposes complete harmony in all dispositions, and complete community of all interests.

That marriage has hitherto been considered as a relation of contract indicates nothing but a want of confidence in marriage. The consciousness that under present perverse conditions true marriages are a rarity dictated the equally perverse precautionary measure of putting marriage into a strait-jacket, so that where love is wanting, its apparent result, the union, can at least be insisted upon.

To form a marriage by contract appears to me about as if two people bound themselves before a notary and witnesses to be happy or to try to be. We marry out of interest, out of inner need, as one feels an interest or a necessity to eat, drink, walk, or read books, etc.; and now comes this topsy-turvy world and expects us to bind ourselves by contract to eat when we are hungry, to drink when we are thirsty, to take down our Goethe when we want to read something beautiful, to kiss when we feel an amorous inclination, etc. Recently an intellectual woman wrote to me: "Of all incomprehensible things, I know none more incomprehensible than marrying." But this woman is "eccentric," and has as little respect for the statute-book as for the Bible. She