Politics & Power Quote by Lafcadio Hearn

Marriage, in Hearn's telling, isn’t romance; it’s infrastructure. The line lands with a sly mix of anthropological distance and quiet indictment: “of course” pretends the point is obvious, but that casual shrug is doing the sharp work of critique. He frames marriage as “the most important act,” not because it is spiritually exalted, but because Western society has engineered it into the central transaction that governs everything else.

The phrasing “simple explanation” signals that Hearn is stripping away the sentimental story Europe and America like to tell themselves. What remains is a system where property, inheritance, legitimacy, social rank, and even a person’s moral standing are routed through the marital channel. “Everything depends upon it” is deliberately totalizing, less a literal claim than a way of showing how thoroughly the institution disciplines lives: it turns intimacy into a public credential and converts private choice into social fate.

Context matters here. Writing in an era when marriage laws and norms were tightening around gender roles, class boundaries, and respectability, Hearn is attuned to how culture manufactures “natural” necessities. His outsider’s eye (he spent much of his career moving between cultures, ultimately in Japan) makes the sentence feel comparative even when it’s aimed at the West: this is how “civilized” societies quietly organize dependence while calling it tradition.

The intent isn’t to denounce marriage outright; it’s to demystify it. Hearn’s subtext is that if everything depends on one institution, the institution has become a lever of power, not merely a vow.