Part 2 — CHAPTER VII The Marriage of the Positive Girl and the Positive Man (continued 2)
Reading edition
I have now examined the monogamic marriage of the positive man and the positive woman in all its more important aspects. Wisdom would seem, at all costs, to advocate the salvage of monogamic marriage from the wreckage of modern society. But before marriage can be saved and handed on as a valuable institution to the New Age, it must be reformed and established on a sounder basis. To continue along our present lines, without correcting our attitude towards marriage and some of the most rigorous customs that govern it, is simply to steer our course headlong back into sexual promiscuity, anarchy and chaos. No reform of modern marriage, or of the ideas that cluster about it, can possibly achieve any good, however, which does not satisfactorily meet every one of the objections I have advanced against it. To proceed, as we are now proceeding, by making the dissolution of marriage easier, is only one step farther in the direction of barbaric promiscuity. No readjustment can avail that does not go to the root of the problems involved; and although it may certainly be legitimate to inquire whether, at this late hour in our torrential degeneration, it is worth while making any reforms in anything, it does not alter the fact that if marriage is to be saved, all the objections to it that have been raised in this chapter will require to be fairly and seriously faced.
Since, however, the sex question is so fundamental as to be almost of primary importance; since the building of the social unit, the ideal family, constitutes the first elementary task in all sound social organization, it is not impossible, fantastic though it may seem, that wise and thorough reform in this department of life may alone prove the best means of rescuing Western Civilization itself.