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MARRIAGE, AS IT WAS, AS IT IS, AND AS IT SHOULD BE

A PLEA FOR REFORM

By Annie Besant

Second Edition

London: Freethought Publishing Company

1882.




MARRIAGE: AS IT WAS, AS IT IS, AND AS IT SHOULD BE.

"_Either all human beings have equal rights, or none have any_."

--Condorcet.




I. MARRIAGE

|The recognition of human rights may be said to be of modern growth, and
even yet they are but very imperfectly understood. Liberty used to
be regarded as a privilege bestowed, instead of as an inherent right;
rights of classes have often been claimed: right to rule, right to tax,
right to punish, all these have been argued for and maintained by force;
but these are not rights, they are only wrongs veiled as legal rights.
Jean Jacques Rousseau struck a new note when he cried: "Men are
born free;" free by birthright was a new thought, when declared as a
universal inheritance, and this "gospel of Jean Jacques Rousseau"
dawned on the world as the sun-rising of a glorious day--a day of human
liberty, unrestrained by class. In 1789 the doctrine of the "Rights of
Man" received its first European sanction by law; in the August of that
year the National Assembly of France proclaimed: "Men are born, and
remain, free and equal in rights.... The aim of political association is
the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man;
these rights are--liberty, property, safety, and resistance of tyranny."
During savage and semi-civilised ages these "imprescriptible rights"
are never dreamed of as existing; brute force is king;