Until we abolish poverty it is
impossible to push rational measures of any kind very far: the
wolf at the door will compel us to live in a state of siege and to
do everything by a bureaucratic martial law that would be quite
unnecessary and indeed intolerable in a prosperous community. But
however we settle the question, we must make the parent justify
his custody of the child exactly as we should make a stranger
justify it. If a family is not achieving the purposes of a family
it should be dissolved just as a marriage should when it, too, is
not achieving the purposes of marriage. The notion that there is
or ever can be anything magical and inviolable in the legal
relations of domesticity, and the curious confusion of ideas which
makes some of our bishops imagine that in the phrase "Whom God
hath joined," the word God means the district registrar or the
Reverend John Smith or William Jones, must be got rid of. Means
of breaking up undesirable families are as necessary to the
preservation of the family as means of dissolving undesirable
marriages are to the preservation of marriage. If our domestic
laws are kept so inhuman that they at last provoke a furious
general insurrection against them as they already provoke many
private ones, we shall in a very literal sense empty the baby out
with the bath by abolishing an institution which needs nothing
more than a little obvious and easy rationalizing to make it not
only harmless but comfortable, honorable, and useful.
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