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

There are other high prices and high precipices I should attack first. I
should admit in the abstract that what is sauce for the goose is sauce
for the gander; that what is good for the rich is good for the poor; but
my first and strongest impression would be that prussic acid sauce is
not good for anybody. I fear I should, on the impulse of the moment,
pull a poor clerk or artisan back by the coat-tails, if he were jumping
over Shakespeare's Cliff, even if Dover sands were strewn with the
remains of the dukes and bankers who had already taken the plunge.

But in one respect, I will heartily concede, the cult of divorce has
differed from the mere cult of death. The cult of death is dead Those I
knew in my youth as young pessimists are now aged optimists. And, what
is more to the point at present, even when it was living it was limited;
it was a thing of one clique in one class. We know the rule in the old
comedy, that when the heroine went mad in white satin, the confidante
went mad in white muslin. But when, in some tragedy of the artistic
temperament, the painter committed suicide in velvet, it was never
implied that the plumber must commit suicide in corduroy. It was never
held that Hedda Walter's housemaid must die in torments on the carpet
(trying as her term of service may have been); or that Mrs. Tanqueray's
butler must play the Roman fool and die on his own carving knife. That
particular form of playing the fool, Roman or otherwise, was an
oligarchic privilege in the decadent epoch; and even as such has largely
passed with that epoch. Pessimism, which was never popular, is no longer
even fashionable. A far different fate has awaited the other fashion;
the other somewhat dismal form of freedom. If divorce is a disease, it
is no longer to be a fashionable disease like appendicitis; it is to be
made an epidemic like small-pox. As we have already seen papers and
public men to-day make a vast parade of the necessity of setting the
poor man free to get a divorce. Now why are they so mortally anxious
that he should be free to get a divorce, and not in the least anxious
that he should be free to get anything else? Why are the same people
happy, nay almost hilarious, when he gets a divorce, who are horrified
when he gets a drink? What becomes of his money, what becomes of his
children, where he works, when he ceases to work, are less and less
under his personal control. Labour Exchanges, Insurance Cards, Welfare
Work, and a hundred forms of police inspection and supervision have
combined for good or evil to fix him more and more strictly to a certain
place in society. He is less and less allowed to go to look for a new
job; why is he allowed to go to look for a new wife? He is more and more
compelled to recognise a Moslem code about liquor; why is it made so
easy for him to escape from his old Christian code about sex? What is
the meaning of this mysterious immunity, this special permit for
adultery; and why is running away with his neighbour's wife to be the
only exhilaration still left open to him? Why must he love as he
pleases; when he may not even live as he pleases?

The answer is, I regret to say, that this social campaign, in most
though by no means all of its most prominent campaigners, relies in this
matter on a very smug and pestilent piece of chalk. There are some