When men and women no longer feel themselves riveted to each other, if they truly love each other, this love will result in leading them reciprocally to seek to merit the love of the being they have chosen. Feeling that the beloved companion may fly away from the nest the day that he or she no longer finds in it the satisfaction once dreamed of, each will try all means to attach the other completely to him or herself. As with those species of birds, in which, during the mating season, the male arrays himself in new and splendid plumage, in order to appear seductive to the female whose favors he wishes to attract, human creatures will cultivate those moral qualities which will make them beloved and render their society agreeable. Based upon such sentiments, unions will become more indissoluble than the most severe laws or the most violent repression could make them.
We have not attempted a criticism of existing marriage, which is equivalent to the most shameless prostitution:—Business marriages in which affectionate sentiments play no part; marriages of accommodation, arranged, especially among bourgeois families, by the parents, without consulting those who are to be united; unequal marriages in which we see aged semi-paralytics, thanks to their money, uniting their old, decaying carcasses with the freshness and beauty of very young girls, or old hags purchasing with a pile of dollars the complaisance of young pimps, who pay with their skins and a little shame for their thirst of getting rich. Such criticism has been made again and again; what is the use of reverting to it? It suffices to have demonstrated that sexual union has not always been arrayed in the same formalities, and that it cannot attain its greatest dignity save by ridding itself of all fetters. What is the use of seeking for anything else?2
VII
Authority
The question of property is so mixed up with that of authority that in treating of the former in its special chapter we could not do otherwise than treat of the origin and evolution of the latter. We shall not therefore return to these, but shall concern ourselves only with the present period, with the authority which is claimed to be based upon universal suffrage, the law of the majority. As we have seen, the divine origin of property and authority being sapped, the bourgeoisie has had to seek a new and more solid basis for them. Having themselves destroyed the basis of divine right, and helped to combat that of the right of force, they sought to substitute therefore that of money, by causing the chambers to be elected under the quit-rent regime, that is to say by a certain category of individuals who paid the highest taxes. Later there was some question of including “qualifications;” this came from the excluded fraction of the bourgeoisie. But all that could be of no long duration. From the moment that authority was put under discussion it lost its strength, and those who had hitherto taken no part in the choice of their masters, were not slow to demand the right to give their opinion upon this choice. The bourgeoisie, who feared the people, did not want to make any concession; they had the power, they wanted to keep it. In order to obtain universal suffrage the workers had to revolt. The bourgeois members whom they carried into power were eager to trick them out of this newly-acquired right, to cut the claws of the monster which they thought would devour them. It was only in the long run, through seeing it in operation, that they came to understand that it was not dangerous to their privileges, that it was but a fiddle upon which one must know how to play, and that this famous weapon for enforcing demands, which the workers believed themselves to have acquired, (they had paid for it with their blood) was but a perfected instrument of authority, which enslaved those who made use of it at the very moment they expected to emancipate themselves.
Indeed what is universal suffrage if not the right of the governed to choose their master, the right of choosing the rod to be whipped with? The voter is sovereign—so far as to be able to choose his master! But he has not the right to dispense with him; for the one that his neighbor will have chosen will be his. From the moment he deposits his ballot in the
