ABSTRACT
The reasonable institution of marriage is understood in Western culture to be founded upon love and upon the freedom of choice of the parties concerned. Marriage is avowedly founded on love and freedom, free love is nevertheless accounted the opposite of marriage. The sinister grotesqueness embodied in the English law of marriage can only be touched upon. It would require a volume to explore the maze of its grim imbecility. Future civilized generations will, there can be no doubt, view the moral marriage laws of England with the same horror and detestation with which present generations look back upon the juridic torture, the disembowelling's and quartering's of sixteenth-century moral laws. According to existing English law, in order to obtain release from the coercive association imposed by the clerk at the Register Office, the man or the woman is required to “commit adultery.”
