on of a shipowner goes into the navy. They would
still call their watches and umbrellas and back gardens their property.

Marriage also will persist as a name attached to a general custom long
after the custom itself will have altered. For example, modern English
marriage, as modified by divorce and by Married Women's Property Acts,
differs more from early XIX century marriage than Byron's marriage did
from Shakespear's. At the present moment marriage in England differs
not only from marriage in France, but from marriage in Scotland.
Marriage as modified by the divorce laws in South Dakota would be called
mere promiscuity in Clapham. Yet the Americans, far from taking a
profligate and cynical view of marriage, do homage to its ideals with a
seriousness that seems old fashioned in Clapham. Neither in England nor
America would a proposal to abolish marriage be tolerated for a moment;
and yet nothing is more certain than that in both countries the
progressive modification of the marriage contract will be continued
until it is no more onerous nor irrevocable than any ordinary commercial
deed of partnership. Were even this dispensed with, people would still
call themselves husbands and wives; describe their companionships as
marriages; and be for the most part unconscious that they were any less
married than Henry VIII. For though a glance at the legal conditions of
marriage in different Christian countries shews that marriage varies
legally from frontier to frontier, domesticity varies so little that
most people believe their own marriage laws to be universal.
Consequently here again, as in the case of Property, the absolute
confidence of the public in the stability of the institution's name,
makes it all the easier to alter its substance.

However, it cannot be denied that one of the changes in public opinion
demanded by the need for the Superman is a very unexpected one. It is
nothing less than the dissolution of the present necessary association
of marriage with conjugation, which most unmarried people regard as the
very diagnostic of marriage. They are wrong, of course: it would be
quite as near the truth to say that conjugation is the one purely
accidental and incidental condition of marriage. Conjugation is
essential to nothing but the propagation of the race; and the moment
that paramount need is provided for otherwise than by marriage,
conjugation, from Nature's creative point of view, ceases to be
essent