No wonder that the exceptional marriage is widely celebrated for it is the exceptional which makes news. But it is a part of the folly of our human race that we are forever tempted to elevate the exception into the norm. B y marriage we place into the hands of women the governance of our household which they promptly extend, as far as they are able, to an interest over all our goods. They rear our children and thereby acquire a share in the disposition of the children's affairs when they have reached maturity. In all these matters they pursue ends totally opposed to those a man envisages.
Women wish only the warmth of a hearth and the shelter of a roof.
They live in fear of catastrophe and no security is sufficiently secure for them and in their eyes the future is not only unknown but catastrophic. To forfend those unknown evils there is no deception to which they will not resort, no rapacity they will not exert, and no other pleasure or enlightenment they will not combat. Had civilization been left in the hands of women we should still be housed in the caves of mountains and man's invention would have ceased with the domestication of fire. M arriage inevitably commits us to extended examples of our wives' conversation. I t shares a characteristic of the conversation of slaves, and logically so, for the position of women in our world has much in common with that of slaves.