thout
which the intimacy of marriage must prove degrading to both the woman
and the man.

Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It
differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is
more binding, more exacting. Its returns are insignificantly small
compared with the investments. In taking out an insurance policy one
pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue
payments. If, however, woman's premium is her husband, she pays for
it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life,
"until death doth part." Moreover, the marriage insurance condemns
her to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness,
individual as well as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his
sphere is wider, marriage does not limit him as much as woman. He
feels his chains more in an economic sense.

Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage.
"Ye who enter here leave all hope behind."

That marriage is a failure none but the very stupid will deny. One
has but to glance over the statistics of divorce to realize how
bitter a failure marriage really is. Nor will the stereotyped
Philistine argument that the laxity of divorce laws and the growing
looseness of woman account for the fact that: first, every twelfth
marriage ends in divorce; second, that since 1870 divorces have
increased from 28 to 73 for every hundred thousand population; third,
that adultery, since 1867, as ground for divorce, has increased 270.8
per cent.; fourth, that desertion increased 369.8 per cent.

Added to these startling figures is a vast amount of material,
dramatic and literary, further elucidating this subject. Robert
Herrick, in TOGETHER; Pinero, in MID-CHANNEL; Eugene Walter, in PAID
IN FULL, and scores of other writers are discussing the barrenness,
the monotony, the sordidness, the inadequacy of marriage as a factor
for harmony and understanding.

The thoughtful social student will not content himself with the
popular superficial excuse for this phenomenon. He will have to dig
deeper into the very life of the sexes to know why marriage proves so
disastrous.

Edward Carpenter says that behind every marriage stands the life-long
environment of the two sexes; an environment so different from each
other that man and woman must remain strangers. Separated by an
insurmountable wall of superstition, custom, and habit, marriage has
not the