CHAPTER XIX.

MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY-THEIR RELATION TO PHALANSTERIAN

ASSOCIATION.

THE chief objection with which the proposal of association has been met by the conservative world is, that it breaks up marriage and the family-institutions which lie at the basis of all the decencies and harmonies of our present social existence, whatever be the abuses and difficulties connected with them. Yes, marriage and the isolated family household are the essential or radical social features of civilization, so that in a broad generalization they are mainly responsible for the goods and the evils, the harmonies and the discords, of its social relations. Which preponderate, let every one answer from his own experience.

But does association break up marriage and the family ? The associationists have replied, yes and no. In the phalanx the substantial and spiritual element of these institutions is discriminated from their arbitrary and material element.

That species of love, whose constancy and mutual absorption render the conduct of the man and woman who feel it for each other analogous to what the marriage institution presupposes of those who contract it, is recognized by the phalanx as a divine relation, and fully respected; but the parties form no binding civil contract before others, subject themselves to no criminal law, and are as free at any time to dissolve their relation and to form others, or to form others which modify this in regard to its exclusiveness, as they were at first to form this one.

All children born of such union are accepted by the phalanx, and entitled to precisely the same advantages of nurseries, industrial playshops, tuition, pleasures, honors, and general development, which it furnishes to all children indiscriminately who are born in its sphere, and to whom the public or social

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MARRIAGE HONORED WHEN SPONTANEOUS.

instinct of its own preservation and advantage, as well as the sentiment of honor and of humanity, guarantee the best education possible.

Thus the phalanx emancipates love from the two principal arbitrary causes of exclusiveness in marriage; to wit, the civil law, and the personal obligation to the support of their children in the isolated household. If exclusive constancy obtain in the love relations of man and woman, it is then no longer an arbitrary fact, nor based on the necessities of poverty, as at present, but an entirely free and spontaneous passional fact, and as such entitled to the respect which it obtains.

It would not be entirely a spontaneous fact, notwithstanding the non-intervention of the civil law, and the social adoption of all children born in the phalanx, were woman there, as in civilization, ill paid for her labors, subjected to drudgery, badly educated, feeble, and excluded by social custom from the greater number of honorable and lucrative occupations; because then woman would still, as now, be dependent on man for every thing, and the individual who supported her might exact of her, in return, what conditions he pleased. This is all otherwise in the phalanx.

Woman is there as self-poised, independent, and perfectly free an individual as man.

She has the same advantages of education, at once practical and theoretical. She chooses, without restriction, from infancy upward, whatever pursuits please the bent of her character, whether in simple industry, fine arts, or sciences, domestic, mechanical, agricultural, or other functions, as few or as many as she can attend to, after passing the necessary probations of aptness and proficiency before the group which she wishes to join. Every where she is honored and rewarded in ratio of her industry and skill, and stands precisely on the same footing as man does in affairs of glory and interest.

The functions peculiarly feminine are justly and liberally retributed, and not considered inferior to those peculiarly masculine. They do not require the same degree of physical strength, but often superior delicacy, tenderness, and skill, which makes

them really equal. Women vote and legislate wherever they are industrially concerned, and become chiefs of departments, when their energy and superior skill, recognized by the groups with whom they work, raises them to that position. There is, then, no reason left in the phalanx why a woman should yield her person to a man, except the impulse of her own heart, and no control over the person of the other possible to either party, except through the fascination of sympathy.

This is not all, however. Two persons thus related to each other in the ties of exclusive love are respected in the phalanx, but not, therefore, accounted better than those whose love relations are very different.

Love is free it is prowess in industry and the arts which confers honor, and personal fascination that wins favor.

Love is free: that is to say, there are many other relations, equally legitimate, recognized and respected as much, and some of them more so, than exclusive monogamy, because they are more useful in their social effects of promoting harmony.

The exclusive absorption of one man in one woman, and of one woman in one man, is a sort of social sleep; and all the respect it can receive from society is, not to be disturbed. In a social sphere, whose organization of labor fully conciliates interests, and whose integral refinement of education promotes the most charming and friendly relations among its members, there are very few persons who will not naturally form numerous and varied love relations, some purely spiritual, and others composite in their character, and which may even coexist with a permanent relation with one favored lover, whose charm is enhanced by these inconstancies or modulations in other varieties of love.

Jealousy, the inversion of love, will be deprived of its stronghold, where no arbitrary and exclusive rights are sanctioned by law or custom-where all is an open question of magnetism, fascination, or passional conquest, preserved by ever-renewed fascination, and where bonds of friendly interest connect all the associates. Luxury, refinement of intellect and

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HERE COMES THE DEVIL AT LAST.

character, a high industrial tone, and the stimulus of ambition, create alternations and diversions in the sphere of love itself, and in those of other passions, soon enabling a disappointed lover to regain his equilibrium.

Love is a source of varied and exquisite happiness in the phalanx, but not an affair of life and death, not a source of duels, suicides, chronic diseases, and broken hearts, as in civilization. The subject of passional equilibria, and the extinction of jealousy, will be treated more elaborately in a future chapter.

The conservative civilizees, then, are more than half right in suspecting that the phalanx will break up marriage. Marriage as they understand it, and as it is now generally understood in the world, is totally incompatible with social harmony, and must be excluded from any successful phalansterian institution.

I see no use in temporizing with blockheads and bigots, who believe in the essential depravity of man and his passions, and who have no conception of order as the harmony of perfect freedom, resulting from the spontaneous expression of individual wills and characters in a social and industrial sphere, adapted to the play of these wills and characters.

Order, for the civilizee, means nothing more nor less than the compression and repression of the individual, by the authority of the mass in democratic countries, and compression of the mass by the authority of the individual in despotic countries. Leaving the generation of vipers to sting themselves to death, we proceed.

The phalanx treats the family just as it treats marriage. It does not break it up, but it supercedes what is arbitrary in the arrangements of the isolated household, and liberates its members, who separate or remain together in their occupations, meals, and pleasures, just as inclination prompts them. They can work together if they please, but as it is very rare to find the father, mother, brothers, and sisters of the same family, with the same industrial tastes, aptitudes, and capacities, it is nearly certain that they will scatter, and severally join the groups engaged in what they prefer; the babes to play in the

ANCIENT MYTHOLOGY.

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nursery, the little boys and girls to the miniature workshops and garden labors, where they will meet children of their own age, using small tools, weeding plants, bringing home vegetables and fruits in their dog-carts, etc.; the older members of the family to other places, according to their choice. They can eat together privately in their family parlor if they prefer doing so, but it is nearly certain that before the dinner hour they will have formed acquaintances, intrigues, and attachments elsewhere, among those they have been working with. Besides, the tastes of men, of women, and of children are usually very different, they will not be attracted by the same bill of fare; they will assort themselves at tables furnished to their respective tastes.

They may wish to dine at different hours; in short, there are fifty good reasons why the members of the same family will not usually eat together when they are no longer obliged to, and not one that I know of, why they should eat at the same table.

So at night, the children's dormitory is in a different part of the phalanstery from the sleeping rooms of the adults; the nursery occupies another section. It is true that nothing hinders the parents from spreading beds for their children in their own apartments, but will they do it? The children will prefer to be off with their companions, and the adults to be unembarrassed by their presence, and undisturbed by their noise, provided they are well cared for elsewhere.

The family, as it now exists, is destined to be absorbed by the phalanx, to pass into a state of myth, to be considered a monstrosity, to be regarded by the children of harmony, who read of it in the ancient histories as an amusing horror, like our story of Bluebeard, or Little Red Riding-hood.

The affections of consanguinity, which are specific passional types, and often very strong, will be developed the more freely and nobly, because no personal collisions of interests and tastes, petty tyrannies or incompatibilities of temperament, will mar the spontaneity of the family meetings, as in the narrow and arbitrary sphere of the civilized household. No other motive