nded me a small slip
very much like that which contained the marriage covenant) imposes on
my estate the payment of an income for Eveena's life equal to that you
have promised her."

With much reluctance I found myself obliged to accept a dowry which,
however natural and proper on Earth, was, I felt, unusual in Mars. I
may say that such charges do not interfere with the free sale of land.
They are registered in the proper office, and the State trustee
collects them from the owner for the time being as quit-rents are
collected in Great Britain or land revenue in India. Turning to
another but kindred question, I said--

"Your marriage contract, like our own laws, appears to favour the
weaker sex more than strict theoretical equality would permit. This is
quite right and practically inevitable; but it hardly agrees with the
theory which supposes bride and bridegroom, husband and wife, to enter
on and maintain a coequal voluntary partnership."

"How so?" he inquired.

"The right of divorce," I said, "at the end of two years belongs to
the wife alone. The husband cannot divorce her except under a heavy
penalty."

"Observe," he answered, "that there is a grave practical inequality
which even theory can hardly ignore. The wife parts with something by
the very fact of marriage. At the end of two years, when she has borne
two, three, or four children, her value in marriage is greatly
lessened. Her capacity of maintaining herself, in the days when women
did work, was found practically to be even smaller than before
marriage. You may say that this really amounts to a recognition by
custom of the natural inequality denied by law; but at any rate, it is
an inequality which it was scarcely possible to overlook. Examine the
practical working of the covenants, and you will find that in
affecting to treat unequals as equals they merely make the weaker the
slave of the stronger."

"Surely," I said, "husband and wife are so far equal, where neither is
tied to the children, that each can make the other heartily glad to
assent to a divorce."

"Perhaps, where law interferes to enforce monogamy, and thereby to
create an artificial equality of mutual dependence. But our law cannot
dictate to equals, whose sex it ignores, the terms or numbers of
partnership. So, the terms of the contract being voluntary, men of
course insist on excluding legal interference in household quarrels;
and before the prohibitive clause was generally adopted,