Marriage is not an institution designed fora select few. Men are not required,as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony, to prove by testimonials thatthey are fit to be trusted with the exercise of absolute power. The tie ofaffection and obligation to a wife and children is very strong with thosewhose general social feelings are strong, and with many who are little sensibleto any other social ties; but there are all degrees of sensibility and insensibilityto it, as there are all grades of goodness and wickedness in men, down tothose whom no ties will bind, and on whom society has no action but throughits ultima ratio, the penalties of the law. In every grade of this descendingscale are men to whom are committed all the legal powers of a husband. Thevilest malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he cancommit any atrocity except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious, can dothat without much danger of the legal penalty. And how many thousands arethere among the lowest classes in every country, who, without being in alegal sense malefactors in any other respect, because in every other quartertheir aggressions meet with resistance, indulge the utmost habitual excessesof bodily violence towards the unhappy wife, who alone, at least of grownpersons, can neither repel nor escape from their brutality; and towards whomthe excess of dependence inspires their mean and savage natures, not witha generous forbearance, and a point of honour to behave well to one whoselot in life is trusted entirely to their kindness, but on the contrary witha notion that the law has delivered her to them as their thing, to be usedat their pleasure, and that they are not expected to practise the considerationtowards her which is required from them towards everybody else. The law,which till lately left even these atrocious extremes of domestic oppressionpractically unpunished, has within these few years made some feeble attemptsto repress them. But its attempts have done little, and cannot be expectedto do much, because it is contrary to reason and experience to suppose thatthere can be any real check to brutality, consistent with leaving the victimstill in the power of the executioner. Until a conviction for personal violence,or at all events a repetition of it after a first conviction, entitles thewoman ipso facto to a divorce, or at least to a judicial separation, theattempt to repress these "aggravated assaults" by legal penaltieswill break down for want of a prosecutor, or for want of a witness.
When we consider how vast is the number of men, in any great country,who are little higher than brutes, and that this never prevents them frombeing able, through the law of marriage, to obtain a victim, the breadthand depth of human misery caused in this shape alone by the abuse of theinstitution swells to something appalling. Yet these are only the extremecases. They are the lowest abysses, but there is a sad succession of depthafter depth before reaching them. In domestic as in political tyranny, thecase of absolute monsters chiefly illustrates the institution by showingthat there is scarcely any horror which may not occur under it if the despotpleases, and thus setting in a strong light what must be the terrible frequencyof things only a little less atrocious. Absolute fiends are as rare as angels,perhaps rarer: ferocious savages, with occasional touches of humanity, arehowever very frequent: and in the wide interval which separates these fromany worthy representatives of the human species, how many are the forms andgradations of animalism and selfishness, often under an outward varnish ofcivilisation and even cultivation, living at peace with the law, maintaininga creditable appearance to all who are not under their power, yet sufficientoften to make the lives of all who are so, a torment and a burthen to them!
It would be tiresome to repeat the commonplaces about the unfitness of menin general for power, which, after the political discussions of centuries,everyone knows by heart, were it not that hardly anyone thinks of applyingthese maxims to the case in which above all others they are applicable, thatof power, not placed in the hands of a man here and there, but offered toevery adult male, down to the basest and most ferocious. It is not becausea man is not known to have broken any of the Ten Commandments, or becausehe maintains a respectable character in his dealings with those whom he cannotcompel to have intercourse with him, or because he does not fly out intoviolent bursts of ill-temper against those who are not obliged to bear withhim, that it is possible to surmise of what sort his conduct will be in theunrestraint of home. Even the commonest men reserve the violent, the sulky,the undisguisedly selfish side of their character for those who have no powerto withstand it. The relation of superiors to dependents is the nursery ofthese vices of character, which, wherever else they exist, are an overflowingfrom that source. A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure tobe one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry intosubmission. If the family in its best forms is, as it is often said to be,a school of sympathy, tenderness, and loving forgetfulness of self, it isstill oftener, as respects its chief, a school of wilfulness, overbearingness,unbounded selfish indulgence, and a double-dyed and idealised selfishness,of which sacrifice itself is only a particular form: the care for the wifeand children being only care for them as parts of the man's own interestsand belongings, and their individual happiness being immolated in every shapeto his smallest preferences. What better is to be looked for under the existingform of the institution? We know that the bad propensities of human natureare only kept within bounds when they are allowed no scope for their indulgence.
