"GKChesterton-TheSuperstitionOfDivorce" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chesterton G.K)

survival of the family as a small and free state? The writers are
content to say that Mr. Brown is uncomfortable with Mrs. Brown, and the
last emancipation, for separated couples, seems only to mean that he is
still uncomfortable without Mrs. Brown. These are not days in which
being uncomfortable is felt as the final test of public action. For the
rest, the reformers show statistically that families are in fact so
scattered in our industrial anarchy, that they may as well abandon hope
of finding their way home again. I am acquainted with that argument for
making bad worse and I see it everywhere leading to slavery. Because
London Bridge is broken down, we must assume that bridges are not meant
to bridge. Because London commercialism and capitalism have copied hell,
we are to continue to copy them. Anyhow, some will retain the conviction
that the ancient bridge built between the two towers of sex is the
worthiest of the great works of the earth.

It is exceedingly characteristic of the dreary decades before the War
that the forms of freedom in which they seemed to specialise were
suicide and divorce. I am not at the moment pronouncing on the moral
problem of either; I am merely noting, as signs of those times, those
two true or false counsels of despair; the end of life and the end of
love. Other forms of freedom were being increasingly curtailed. Freedom
indeed was the one thing that progressives and conservatives alike
contemned. Socialists were largely concerned to prevent strikes, by
State arbitration; that is, by adding another rich man to give the
casting vote between rich and poor. Even in claiming what they called
the right to work they tacitly surrendered the right to leave off
working. Tories were preaching conscription, not so much to defend the
independence of England as to destroy the independence of Englishmen.
Liberals, of course, were chiefly interested in eliminating liberty,
especially touching beer and betting. It was wicked to fight, and unsafe
even to argue; for citing any certain and contemporary fact might land
one in a libel action. As all these doors were successfully shut in our
faces along the chilly and cheerless corridor of progress (with its
glazed tiles) the doors of death and divorce alone stood open, or rather
opened wider and wider. I do not expect the exponents of divorce to
admit any similarity in the two things; yet the passing parallel is not
irrelevant. It may enable them to realise the limits within which our
moral instincts can, even for the sake of argument, treat this desperate
remedy as a normal object of desire. Divorce is for us at best a
failure, of which we are more concerned to find and cure the cause than
to complete the effects; and we regard a system that produces many
divorces as we do a system that drives men to drown and shoot
themselves. For instance, it is perhaps the commonest complaint against
the existing law that the poor cannot afford to avail themselves of it.
It is an argument to which normally I should listen with special
sympathy. But while I should condemn the law being a luxury, my first
thought will naturally be that divorce and death are only luxuries in a
rather rare sense. I should not primarily condole with the poor man on
the high price of prussic acid; or on the fact that all precipices of
suitable suicidal height were the private property of the landlords.