ol. i, p. 237.

[352] In England this step was taken in the reign of Henry VII, when the
forcible marriage of women against their will was forbidden by statute (3
Henry VII, c. 2). Even in the middle of the seventeenth century, however,
the question of forcible marriage had again to be dealt with (_Inderwick_,
Interregnum, pp. 40 et seq.).

[353] Woods Hutchinson (_Contemporary Review_, Sept., 1905) argues that
when there is epilepsy, insanity, moral perversion, habitual drunkenness,
or criminal conduct of any kind, divorce, for the sake of the next
generation, should be not permissive but compulsory. Mere divorce,
however, would not suffice to attain the ends desired.

[354] Similarly in Germany, Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, who had suffered much
from marriage, whatever her own defects of character may have been, writes
at the end of _Meine Lebensbeichte_ that "as long as women have not the
courage to regulate, without State-interference or Church-interference,
relationships which concern themselves alone, they will not be free." In
place of this old decayed system of marriage so opposed to our modern
thoughts and feelings, she would have private contracts made by a lawyer.
In England, at a much earlier period, Charles Kingsley, who was an ardent
friend to women's movements, and whose feeling for womanhood amounted
almost to worship, wrote to J.S. Mill: "There will never be a good world
for women until the last remnant of the Canon law is civilized off the
earth."

[355] "No fouler institution was ever invented," declared Auberon Herbert
many years ago, expressing, before its time, a feeling which has since
become more common; "and its existence drags on, to our deep shame,
because we have not the courage frankly to say that the sexual relations
of husband and wife, or those who live together, concern their own selves,
and do not concern the prying, gloating, self-righteous, and intensely
untruthful world outside."

[356] Hobhouse, op. cit. vol. i, p. 237.

[357] The same conception of marriage as a contract still persists to some
extent also in the United States, whither it was carried by the early
Protestants and Puritans. No definition of marriage is indeed usually laid
down by the States, but, Howard says (op. cit., vol. ii, p. 395), "in
effect matrimony is treated as a relation partaking of the nature of both
status and contract."

[358] This point of view has been vigorously set forth by Paul and Victor
Margu