next step would be to have a marriage makeable by the oral declaration of both parties and terminable by the oral declaration of either, which would be, indeed, no marriage at all, but an encounter.  You might marry a dozen times in that way in a day....  Somewhere between these extremes lies the marriage law of a civilised state.  Let us, rather than working down from the eternal marriage of the religious idealists, work up from Mr. Shaw.  The former course is, perhaps, inevitable for the legislator, but the latter is much more convenient for our discussion.

Now, the idea of a divorce so easy and wilful as Mr. Shaw proposes arises naturally out of an exclusive consideration of what I may call the amorous sentimentalities of marriage.  If you regard marriage as merely the union of two people in love, then, clearly, it is intolerable, an outrage upon human dignity, that they should remain intimately united when either ceases to love.  And in that world of Mr. Shaw’s dreams, in which everybody is to have an equal income and nobody is to have children, in that culminating conversazione of humanity, his marriage law will, no doubt, work with the most admirable results.  But if we make a step towards reality and consider a world in which incomes are unequal, and economic difficulties abound—­for the present we will ignore the complication of offspring—­we at once find it necessary to modify the first fine simplicity of divorce at either partner’s request.  Marriage is almost always a serious economic disturbance for both man and woman:  work has to be given up and rearranged, resources have to be pooled; only in the rarest cases does it escape becoming an indefinite business partnership.  Accordingly, the withdrawal of one partner raises at once all sorts of questions of financial adjustment, compensation for physical, mental, and moral damage, division of furniture and effects and so forth.  No doubt a very large part of this could be met if there existed some sort of marriage settlement providing for the dissolution of the partnership.  Otherwise the petitioner for a Shaw-esque divorce must be prepared for the most exhaustive and penetrating examination before, say, a court of three assessors—­representing severally the husband, the wife, and justice—­to determine the distribution of the separation.  This point, however, leads me to note in passing the need that does exist even to-day for a more precise business supplement to marriage as we know it in England and America.  I think there ought to be a very definite and elaborate treaty of partnership drawn up by an impartial private tribunal for every couple that marries, providing for most of the eventualities of life, taking cognizance of the earning power, the property and prospects of either party, insisting upon due insurances, ensuring private incomes for each partner, securing the welfare of the children, and laying down equitable conditions in the event of a divorce or separation.  Such a treaty ought to be a necessary prelude to the issue of a licence to marry.  And given such a basis to go upon, then I see no reason why, in the case of couples who remain childless for five or six years, let us say, and seem likely to remain childless, the Shaw-esque divorce at the instance of either party, without reason assigned, should not be a very excellent thing indeed.