The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX doubtless wished to speak of property absorbed in itself, withdrawn from free exchange, turned from common use. If such were his thought, he might go further, and say that such a suppression of public life is indeed assassination. It is the crime of monopoly, which public instinct has always looked upon as treason to the human race. The family is a natural society which results from marriage. Marriage is the union of two beings joined by love, who promise each other mutual devotion in the interest of the children who may be born. Married persons who have a child, and who separate, are impious. Do they then wish to execute the judgment of Solomon and hew the child asunder? To vow eternal love is puerile; sexual love is an emotion, divine doubtless, but accidental, involuntary and transitory; but the promise of reciprocal devotion is the essence of mar- riage and the fundamental principle of the family. The sanction and the guarantee of this promise must then be an absolute confidence. Every jealousy is a suspicion, and every suspicion is an outrage. The real adultery is the breach of this trust: the woman who complains of her husband to another man; the man who confides to another woman the disappointments or the hopes of his heart,—these do, indeed, betray conjugal faith. The surprises which one’s senses spring upon one are only infidelities on account of the impulses of the heart which abandons itself more or less to the whispers of pleasure. Moreover, these are human faults for which one must blush, 48