rights and duties; it did not concern itself with any deeper bond, and then went on to express the view that marriages were really indissoluble. My guess is, and it can only be a guess, that they failed to recognise the nature of the institution that they were writing about. They made, C1ausewitz would have said, the worst mistake they could have made at the very start; they failed to understand the nature of marriage. One way they failed was to refuse to see the evil of the matrimonial wrong; if you refuse to recognise evil for what it is, you must not be surprised if you cannot see reality either. It is all part of the modern fashion of thinking that you can govern a community and keep it in order by a policy of, “all smiles”; you cannot. It is part of Rousseau's myth of the perfectibility of man; and it is false. The writer of Genesis was nearer the mark when he said that the human heart is continually inclined towards wickedness. You need an element of fear or coercion, because it is the only language that some people understand. To think that you could propose legislation for marriage in the community on the basis of a policy of “all smiles, and no fault” was folly to say the least. The legislation that followed helped to open the floodgates to divorce; it has been a social disaster from which it will take generations to recover. The failure to recognise institutions for what they are is indeed the worst mistake you can make, if you have in mind to start tampering with them.
This has always been so. People do not change; it is the organisation of society that changes, and with those changes comes a change in what society expects of its members. So it is that institutions have to be changed to cope with changing social conditions; and great care is needed in proposing and effecting these changes. We tend to think of our mechanical world as superior to any society in the past, and there may be a little truth in this; we do all enjoy greater wealth, and better health. But it is a great mistake to look down on the efforts of our ancestors, because there has been no change in the ability of man,…