* * * *

And mind you, it isn't as if I could save myself and you could save
yourself; we are all in the same canoe, and we all go overboard
together. You, perhaps, have a son who is drafted into the trenches in
winter-time, and drowned in blood and mud, because in Europe the
Catholic party supported militarism, and kept aristocratic criminals
in control of states. Or you find yourself involved in a marital
tragedy, and in order to free yourself from unendurable misery, you
are obliged to go to law-courts dominated by the tradition of Paul,
the Roman bureaucrat, who despised women, and regarded marriage as a
means of gratifying an unclean animal desire. "It is better to marry
than to burn," he said, with unmatchable brutality; and so of course
those who think him a voice of God can form no conception of the
dignity and grace of love, and if you want sound and wholesome
sex-conventions, you will be as apt to find them among the Ashantees
or the Kamchadals as among the followers of the Apostle to the
Gentiles.

You go to a so-called "divorce-court," which is dominated by this
Christian taboo, and exists for the purpose of barring you from a
second chance at the gratification of your unclean animal desire. You
are not permitted to tell your own story, for that would be
"collusion;" you listen while your intimate friends recite the pitiful
and shameful details of your domestic misfortune, under the
cross-questioning of lawyers who have suppressed for the time whatever
decent instincts they may possess, and follow blindly the details of a
prescribed procedure, at the cost of all sincerity, humanity and
truth. The next morning you find that the privacy guaranteed you by
law has been taken from you by corrupt court officials, who have sold
copies of the testimony to the newspapers, so that all the intimate
details of where you slept and where your wife slept and what you saw
your wife doing have been thrown out to journalistic jackals, who
scream with glee as they rend the carcass of your dead love. And in
the end, perhaps, you find that you have gone through this horror for
nothing--the august court with its Roman Catholic judge throws out
your petition, its suspicions having been excited by the fact that
when you discovered your domestic tragedy, you sought to behave like a
civilized person, with pity and self-restraint, instead of like a
sultan in Turkey, or a basso in an Italian grand opera.