Marriages of the Future.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIX, Issue 8, 24 August 1907, Page 46

Marriages of the Future.

What will married life be like in the future is the question that a writer has set himself to disc.uss. The characteristic feature of marriage at the present time, he says, is the consolidation of love with, the question of ceonoinio relations. > Whenever there is any - pltilosopntising about! marriage it deals exclusively, as a rule, with the love element; and this one-sidedness of view excludes the possibility of reaching any solution of the problem. The economic element is too important a factor to be ignored. Alarriage in its present form is commonly also a question of providing for the woman. There still clings to it something of the marriage-by-purchase. By the marriage the woman purchases her own support and that of her children; not to mention the rarer cases in which the man is the seeker of marriage for support. All difficulties, all contradictions, all absurdities of the average marriage nowadays rest upon the intrusion of this economic element into the love question, and nothing but a complete economic change can alter the situation. Let us represent to ourselves a community resting upon the principle of collective production. which, therefore, draws upon every member for its productive force, giving to each, in return, whether man or woman, the required sustenance. This would be the end of all personal relations of dependency—also the end of the mutual dependence of the sexes. The economic phase of the problem would thus be absolutely segregated from that of love; and thereby at last a rational solution of the questions relating to the latter made possible. As marriage would have nothing to do with the support of the marriage mate, every reason for the artificial deferring of the age of marriage would Vanish, which-would, in time, result in the ces - sation of many social evils now rampint. Freed from all its industrial motives, the only motive for marriage would be reciprocal attraction; and ’the “result would be that women could actuallychoose, whereas now their choice of lifecompanions is merely a legal fiction. That marriages contracted in that way would come nearer to the ideal than the majority of marriages now do is very probable. But then, too, the unavoidable errors which would be made would lose their tragic import.