Creatures so close to each other as husband and wife,
or a mother and children, have powers of making each other
happy or miserable with which no public coercion can deal.
If a marriage could be dissolved every morning it would not give
back his night's rest to a man kept awake by a curtain lecture;
and what is the good of giving a man a lot of power where
he only wants a little peace? The child must depend on the most
imperfect mother; the mother may be devoted to the most
unworthy children; in such relations legal revenges are vain.
Even in the abnormal cases where the law may operate, this difficulty
is constantly found; as many a bewildered magistrate knows.
He has to save children from starvation by taking away
their breadwinner. And he often has to break a wife's
heart because her husband has already broken her head.
The State has no tool delicate enough to deracinate the rooted
habits and tangled affections of the family; the two sexes,
whether happy or unhappy, are glued together too tightly
for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in between them.
The man and the woman are one flesh--yes, even when they are
not one spirit. Man is a quadruped. Upon this ancient and
anarchic intimacy, types of government have little or no effect;
it is happy or unhappy, by its own sexual wholesomeness and
genial habit, under the republic of Switzerland or the despotism
of Siam. Even a republic in Siam would not have done much
towards freeing the Siamese Twins.

The problem is not in marriage, but in sex; and would be felt
under the freest concubinage. Nevertheless, the overwhelming mass
of mankind has not believed in freedom in this matter, but rather
in a more or less lasting tie. Tribes and civilizations differ about