A COPARTNERSHIP

Marriage, considered merely in its financial and business relations, may be
regarded as a permanent copartnership.

Now, in an ordinary copartnership there is very often a complete division
of labor among the partners. If they manufacture locomotive-engines, for
instance, one partner perhaps superintends the works, another attends to
mechanical inventions and improvements, another travels for orders, another
conducts the correspondence, another receives and pays out the money. The
latter is not necessarily the head of the firm. Perhaps his place could be
more easily filled than some of the other posts. Nevertheless, more money
passes through his hands than through those of all the others put together.
Now, should he, at the year's end, call together the inventor and the
superintendent and the traveller and the correspondent, and say to them,
"I have earned all this money this year, but I will generously give you
some of it,"--he would be considered simply impertinent, and would hardly
have a chance to repeat the offence the year after.

Yet precisely what would be called folly in this business partnership is
constantly done by men in the copartnership of marriage, and is there
called "common sense" and "social science" and "political economy."

For instance, a farmer works himself half to death in the hayfield, and his
wife meanwhile is working herself wholly to death in the dairy. The
neighbors come in to sympathize after her demise; and during the few
months' interval before his second marriage they say approvingly, "He was
always a generous man to his folks! He was a good provider!" But where was
the room for generosity, any more than the member of any other firm is to
be called generous, when he keeps the books, receipts the bills, and
divides the money?

In case of the farming business, the share of the wife is so direct and
unmistakable that it can hardly be evaded. If anything is earned by the
farm, she does her distinct and important share of the earning. But it is
not necessary that she should do even that, to make her, by all the rules
of justice, an equal partner, entitled to her full share of the financial
proceeds.

Let us suppose an ordinary case. Two young people are married, and begin
life together. Let us suppose them equally poor, equally capable, equally
conscientious, equally healthy. They have children. Those children must be
supported by the earning of money abroad,