arried without a marriage
settlement. Thus the active effect of the mores may be observed in
contemporary custom, and it is seen how completely the notion of being
duly married is produced by the mores of the society, or of a class or
sect in it.

+385. Pair marriage; its technical definition.+ Polyandry passed over
into polygamy when sufficient property was at command.[1241] There was a
neutral middle point where one man had one wife. It follows that
monogamy is not a specific term. It might be monogamy if one man had one
wife but also concubines and slaves, or he might have but one wife in
fact, although free to have more if he chose. The term "pair marriage"
is needed as a technical term for the form of marriage which is as
exclusive and permanent for the man as for the woman, which one enters
on the same plane of free agreement as the other, and in which all the
rights and duties are mutual. In such a union there may be a complete
fusion of two lives and interests. In no other form of union is such a
fusion possible. This pair marriage is the ideal which guides the
marital usages of our time and civilization, gives them their spirit and
sense, and furnishes standards for all our discussions, although it is
far from being universally realized. The ideal is made an object of
"pathos"[1242] in our popular literature. Whence did it come? In truth,
we can hardly learn. It existed, by necessity of poverty and humble
social status, in the classes amongst whom Christianity took root. It
found expression in the canon law. It resisted, in the lower classes,
the attempt of the church to suppress it in order to aggrandize the
corporation. It resisted, in the same classes, the corruption of the
Renaissance. It has risen with those classes to wealth and civil power.
In modern times "moral" has been used technically for what conforms to
the code of pair marriage.

+386. Ethics of pair marriage.+ Pair marriage has excluded every other
form of sex relation. To modern people it is hard to understand how
different forms of sex relation could exist side by side and all be
right. The explanation is in the mores. A concubine may be a woman who
has a defined and legally guaranteed relation to one man, if the mores
have so determined. Her circumstances have not opened to her the first
rank, that of a wife, but she has another which is recognized in the
society as honorable. The same may be said of a slave woman, or of a
morganatic wife.