Before breeding time birds build their nests to receive their future young and to protect them from the weather. Many men, more improvident than the birds, marry without knowing where and how they can house the children of their love. Air, earth, and forest afford food to birds gratuitously; to man only the butcher, the baker, and eating-house keeper give food, and they have the weakness to ask payment for their services. Economic improvidence in marriage is the bane of all social [Pg 172] decadence, and it is precisely amongst workmen and the unemployed, or amongst those who are always struggling and succumbing, that one finds it most, for they have become thoughtless fatalists, to whom the day is sufficient. Fatalism has many forms, but it is always a cowardly emasculation of self, or an even more cruel mutilation, for it undermines the strength of the will and leads us to renounce all that is best in us. In individuals it is emasculation or mutilation, in nations it is suicide; the Ottoman Empire will soon show us whither Turkish fatalism leads.

I am compassionate, and believe that I pay my debts of charity toward those who have wrecked their life; but when a starving fellow begs alms [Pg 173] of me, or pleads his large family or many children as an excuse for his moral and physical demoralisation, anger gets the better of me and I exclaim: Why, then, did you have so many?

And this exclamation is not an insult to misery nor a curse; it is the voice of reason, which if it could be heard in the homes of the poor would suffice to solve the social problem. I am a Malthusian impenitent, and as long as I live I shall always say to those struggling with poverty:

Love, but do not beget children.

In vain priests and rugged moralists of Providence combat Malthusianism, which has now become a social institution, and without the need of written codes governs the economy of [Pg 174] the family in France, Italy, Germany, and even in chaste and fecund Albion.

In vain my Elementi d’Igiene were put ad indice, for from year to year the Malthusian apostolate has made new disciples, and will continue to do so.

Neither do I side with those who believe, with too great a faith or fanaticism, that a restriction in the number of births is sufficient to resolve the social problem. No, certainly not; it is not enough; but it clears the ground of the most thorny brambles among which human felicity gets entangled; and a comparison between the proletariat in the populous cities of Europe and that of the desert regions of South America is sufficient to convince us that prolific improvidence [Pg 175] is also the prolific mother of hunger, disease, and death.

If, then, you are not a Malthusian, nor desire to be converted to the new doctrine, if you have no straw to build your nest, do not take a wife, but increase the glorious number of the animals of rapine and cuckoos.

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I know very well that the most hateful and disagreeable problem of matrimony is the economic, but we cannot avoid nor solve it by shutting our eyes and disregarding it.

To love and be loved, to feel that our life is doubled and the horizons of the future enlarged, to drink from the eyes of a woman who is a perfect fountain of delight, to feel the doors of [Pg 176] paradise opened to us by her lips; and then all at once to be obliged to speak of income and dowry amidst such intoxicating pleasures; then to remember between one kiss and another that to harbour all this paradise we do not possess, I cannot say a house, but not even the most modest of rooms! It is hard, cruel, abominable, but it is necessary!

The quart d’heure de Rabelais in the affairs of love, and the exclamation of the Trappists who at table say to their brethren: Remember we must all die, are the waiters who, entering the guest chamber, present the bill to the gay and thoughtless merry-makers. But in matrimony the accounts must be made out before, and drawn up seriously, calmly, and inexorably.

[Pg 177]

There is only one man in whose case I could overlook a want of this prudence, and it is he who feels that he has the strength to fight for and the energy to gain a position, and to the man who strikes his forehead and exclaims, Numen adest. What does it matter if such a man has no fortune, nor even a dowry with her whom he loves? He has faith in himself founded not upon pride, but upon the consciousness of knowledge and power; and this is more than a patrimony, for neither phylloxera, bank failures, nor shipwreck can assail it. It will last as long as life itself, and its results still longer.

But how many such men are there? With the experience of more than half a century I recommend all others [Pg 178] to use such foresight as is near akin to fear. The whole history of Italian finance, and the whole chronology of our innumerable ministers of finance, teach us that the balance of expenditure is always greater than that of the income. Just fancy when these are added up by that maddest of treasury ministers whose name is Love!

The following words must have been repeated more than a thousand times between a kiss and a sigh, A cottage and your heart!

But common sense has succeeded in throwing so much cold water on the phrase as to render it ridiculous, and to relegate it to the museum of comic virtues. However, notwithstanding the many years I have lived, I still [Pg 179] have the ingenuous good nature to believe this phrase when it comes warmly and spontaneously from two loving hearts, and when those two hearts live in two organisms superior in intelligence and sentiment it may yet be true; the cottage may soon become a house, perhaps even a palace.

But how many such are there?

The rest no longer say, A cottage and your heart; but, A palace even without your heart. A hundred thousand francs income, with or without the heart.

In the first pages of this book we have seen how and why the economic consideration dominates marriage in civilised society with all the rigour of a tyrant, how it commands everything, [Pg 180] and is the “to be or not to be” of a family.

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As regards the balance of fortune, the ideal in marriage would be that both husband and wife should be equally rich, or both have moderate means. It is not necessary that there should be absolute equality, but it ought to approach it. In these fortunate cases the equality of the income increases the dignity of the family to a fellowship, and is necessarily accompanied by many other harmonies of habits, tastes, and needs.

An hyper-ideal of perfection would be this, that although the amount of these incomes may be the same, the separate units should be of a different [Pg 181] nature. Thus if the husband be a rich land owner the wife should hold house property; and if she has a large share of money in the funds the other should own lands or hou............