Post-Prandial Philosophy

14. The Decline of Marriage

Men don't marry nowadays. So everybody tells us. And I suppose we may

therefore conclude, by a simple act of inference, that women in turn

don't marry either. It takes two, of course, to make a quarrel--or a

marriage.

Why is this? "Young people nowadays want to begin where their fathers

left off." "Men are made so comfortable at present in their clubs."

"College-bred girls have no taste for housekeeping." "Rents are so high

and manners so luxurious." Good heavens, what silly trash, what puerile

nonsense! Are we all little boys and girls, I ask you, that we are to

put one another off with such transparent humbug? Here we have to deal

with a primitive instinct--the profoundest and deepest-seated instinct

of humanity, save only the instincts of food and drink and of

self-preservation. Man, like all other animals, has two main functions:

to feed his own organism, and to reproduce his species. Ancestral habit

leads him, when mature, to choose himself a mate--because he loves her.

It drives him, it urges him, it goads him irresistibly. If this profound

impulse is really lacking to-day in any large part of our race, there

must be some correspondingly profound and adequate reason for it. Don't

let us deceive ourselves with shallow platitudes which may do for

drawing-rooms. This is philosophy, even though post-prandial. Let us try

to take a philosophic view of the question at issue, from the point of

vantage of a biological outlook.

Before you begin to investigate the causes of a phenomenon _quelconque_,

'tis well to decide whether the phenomenon itself is there to

investigate.

Taking society throughout--_not_ in the sense of those "forty families"

to which the term is restricted by Lady Charles Beresford--I doubt

whether marriage is much out of fashion. Statistics show a certain

decrease, it is true, but not an alarming one. Among the labouring

classes, I imagine men, and also women, still wed pretty frequently.

When people say, "Young men won't marry nowadays," they mean young men

in a particular stratum of society, roughly bounded by a silk hat on

Sundays. Now, when you and I were young (I take it for granted that you

and I are approaching the fifties) young men did marry; even within this

restricted area, 'twas their wholesome way in life to form an attachment

early with some nice girl in their own set, and to start at least with

the idea of marrying her. Toward that goal they worked; for that end

they endured and sacrificed many things. True, even then, the long

engagement was the rule; but the long engagement itself meant some

persistent impulse, some strong impetus marriage-wards. The desire of

the man to make this woman his own, the longing to make this woman

happy--normal and healthy endowments of our race--had still much

driving-power. Nowadays, I seriously think I observe in most young men

of the middle class around me a distinct and disastrous weakening of the

impulse. They don't fall in love as frankly, as honestly, as

irretrievably as they used to do. They shilly-shally, they pick and

choose, they discuss, they criticise. They say themselves these futile

foolish things about the club, and the flat, and the cost of living.

They believe in Malthus. Fancy a young man who believes in Malthus! They

seem in no hurry at all to get married. But thirty or forty years ago,

young men used to rush by blind instinct into the toils of

matrimony--because they couldn't help themselves. Such Laodicean

luke-warmness betokens in the class which exhibits it a weakening of

impulse. That weakening of impulse is really the thing we have to

account for.

Young men of a certain type don't marry, because--they are less of young

men than formerly.

Wild animals in confinement seldom propagate their kind. Only a few

caged birds will continue their species. Whatever upsets the balance of

the organism, in an individual or a race tends first of all to affect

the rate of reproduction. Civilise the red man, and he begins to

decrease at once in numbers. Turn the Sandwich Islands into a trading

community, and the native Hawaiian refuses forthwith to give hostages to

fortune. Tahiti is dwindling. From the moment the Tasmanians were taken

to Norfolk Island, not a single Tasmanian baby was born. The Jesuits

made a model community of Paraguay; but they altered the habits of the

Paraguayans so fast that the reverend fathers, who were, of course,

themselves celibates, were compelled to take strenuous and even

grotesque measures to prevent the complete and immediate extinction of

their converts. Other cases in abundance I might quote an I would; but I

limit myself to these. They suffice to exhibit the general principle

involved; any grave upset in the conditions of life affects first and at

once the fertility of a species.

"But colonists often increase with rapidity." Ay, marry, do they, where

the conditions of life are easy. At the present day most colonists go to

fairly civilised regions; they are transported to their new home by

steamboat and railway; they find for the most part more abundant

provender and more wholesome surroundings than in their native country.

There is no real upset. Better food and easier life, as Herbert Spencer

has shown, result (other things equal) in increased fertility. His

chapters on this subject in the "Principles of Biology" should be read

by everybody who pretends to talk on questions of population. But in new

and difficult colonies the increase is slight. Whatever compels greater

wear and tear of the nervous system proves inimical to the reproductive

function. The strain and stress of co-ordination with novel

circumstances and novel relations affect most injuriously the organic

balance. The African n***o has long been accustomed to agricultural toil

and to certain simple arts in his own country. Transported to the West

Indies and the United States, he found life no harder than of old, if

not, indeed, easier. He had abundant food, protection, security, a kind

of labour for which he was well adapted. Instead of dying out,

therefore, he was fruitful, and multiplied, and replenished the earth

amazingly. But the Red Indian, caught blatant in the hunting stage,

refused to be tamed, and could not swallow civilisation. He pined and

dwined and decreased in his "reservations." The change was too great,

too abrupt, too brusque for him. The papoose before long became an

extinct animal.

Is not the same thing true of the middle class of England? Civilisation

and its works have come too quickly upon us. The strain and stress of

correlating and co-ordinating the world we live in are getting too much

for us. Railways, telegraphs, the penny post, the special edition, have

played havoc at last with our nervous systems. We are always on the

stretch, rushing and tearing perpetually. We bolt our breakfasts; we

catch the train or 'bus by the skin of our teeth, to rattle us into the

City; we run down to Scotland or over to Paris on business; we lunch in

London and dine in Glasgow, Belfast, or Calcutta. (Excuse imagination.)

The tape clicks perpetually in our ears the last quotation in Eries; the

telephone rings us up at inconvenient moments. Something is always

happening somewhere to disturb our equanimity; we tear open the _Times_

with feverish haste, to learn that Kimberleys or Jabez Balfour have

fallen, that Matabeleland has been painted red, that shares have gone

up, or gone down, or evaporated. Life is one turmoil of excitement and

bustle. Financially, 'tis a series of dissolving views; personally 'tis

a rush; socially, 'tis a mosaic of deftly-fitted engagements. Drop out

one piece, and you can never replace it. You are full next week from

Monday to Saturday--business all day, what calls itself pleasure (save

the mark!) all evening. Poor old Leisure is dead. We hurry and scurry

and flurry eternally. One whirl of work from morning till night: then

dress and dine: one whirl of excitement from night till morning. A snap

of troubled sleep, and again _da capo_. Not an hour, not a minute, we

can call our own. A wire from a patient ill abed in Warwickshire! A wire

from a client hard hit in Hansards! Endless editors asking for more

copy! more copy! Alter to suit your own particular trade, and 'tis the

life of all of us.

The first generation after Stephenson and the Rocket pulled through with

it somehow. They inherited the sound constitutions of the men who sat on

rustic seats in the gardens of the twenties. The second

generation--that's you and me--felt the strain of it more severely: new

machines had come in to make life still more complicated: sixpenny

telegrams, Bell and Edison, submarine cables, evening papers,

perturbations pouring in from all sides incessantly; the suburbs

growing, the hubbub increasing, Metropolitan railways, trams, bicycles,

innumerable: but natheless we still endured, and presented the world all

the same with a third generation. That third generation--ah me! there

comes the pity of it! One fancies the impulse to marry and rear a family

has wholly died out of it. It seems to have died out most in the class

where the strain and stress are greatest. I don't think young men of

that class to-day have the same feelings towards women of their sort as

formerly. Nobody, I trust, will mistake me for a reactionary: in most

ways, the modern young man is a vast improvement on you and me at

twenty-five. But I believe there is really among young men in towns less

chivalry, less devotion, less romance than there used to be. That, I

take it, is the true reason why young men don't marry. With certain

classes and in certain places a primitive instinct of our race has

weakened. They say this weakening is accompanied in towns by an increase

in sundry hateful and degrading vices. I don't know if that is so; but

at least one would expect it. Any enfeeblement of the normal and natural

instinct of virility would show itself first in morbid aberrations. On

that I say nothing. I only say this--that I think the present crisis in

the English marriage market is due, not to clubs or the comfort of

bachelor quarters, but to the cumulative effect of nervous

over-excitement.