outside of
marriage, preserve marriages at all? This question can be answered
confidently. Marriage in its permanent monogamous form will be
maintained because the great majority of women and men want it to be
maintained. The contract-partnerships I have suggested will be powerless
to harm wedded love, of which the child is the glorious symbol. No law
is needed to protect this beauty. There will always remain a penalty to
those who seek variety in love, in that unrest that is the other side of
variety.

It is the highest type of men and women who will seek to marry and be
best and happiest, if living together as faithful husband and wife, as
devoted father and mother, I do, however, hold, that there are
others--women and men--without the gifts that make for successful
parenthood or happy permanent marriage. I would recognize this frankly,
and let those who do not desire marriage be openly permitted to live
together in honorable temporary unions.

Surely it is the wisest arrangement for the man and woman worker who do
not want children, and, not wishing for the bondage of a continuous
companionship, desire to pass their lives in liberty. It is possible
that in some cases such friendship-contracts might serve as a
preliminary to marriage, while, under our present disastrous conditions,
they might also be made by those who are unsuitably mated and yet are
unable, or do not wish, to sever the bond with some other partner. Such
contracts would open up possibilities of honorable relations to many who
now are driven into shameful and secret unions.

In this way much evil would be prevented. As time went on, hasty
marriage would come to be looked on with disapproval, and many unions
would be prevented that now inevitably come to disaster. And this would
leave greater chances of marriage and child-bearing for others and more
suitable types; while further, these sterile unions would, by their
childlessness, act to remove for ever from the world those unsuited to
be parents. It is this last result that matters most.

XI

The whole question of any sexual relationships outside of marriage in
the past has been left in the gutters, so to speak, of necessity made
disreputable by the shames of concealment. Much of this would be
changed. Moreover, prostitution, and also the diseases so closely
connected with prostitution, would be greatly lessened, though I do not
think sexual sins would cease. There will always be, for a very l