his
matter. In these Anticipations it is impossible to ignore the forces
making for a considerable relaxation of the institution of permanent
monogamous marriage in the coming years, and of a much greater variety
of establishments than is suggested by these possibilities within the
pale. I guess, without attempting to refer to statistics, that our
present society must show a quite unprecedented number and increasing
number of male and female celibates--not religious celibates, but
people, for the most part, whose standard of personal comfort has such a
relation to their earning power that they shirk or cannot enter the
matrimonial grouping. The institution of permanent monogamous
marriage--except in the ideal Roman Catholic community, where it is
based on the sanction of an authority which in real Roman Catholic
countries a large proportion of the men decline to obey--is sustained at
present entirely by the inertia of custom, and by a number of
sentimental and practical considerations, considerations that may very
possibly undergo modification in the face of the altered relationship of
husband and wife that the present development of childless _menages_ is
bringing about. The practical and sustaining reason for monogamy is the
stability it gives to the family; the value of a stable family lies in
the orderly upbringing in an atmosphere of affection that it secures in
most cases for its more or less numerous children. The monogamous family
has indisputably been the civilizing unit of the pre-mechanical
civilized state. It must be remembered that both for husband and wife in
most cases monogamic life marriage involves an element of sacrifice, it
is an institution of late appearance in the history of mankind, and it
does not completely fit the psychology or physiology of any but very
exceptional characters in either sex. For the man it commonly involves
considerable restraint; he must ride his imagination on the curb, or
exceed the code in an extremely dishonouring, furtive, and
unsatisfactory manner while publicly professing an impossible virtue;
for the woman it commonly implies many uncongenial submissions. There
are probably few married couples who have escaped distressful phases of
bitterness and tears, within the constraint of their, in most cases,
practically insoluble bond. But, on the other hand, and as a reward that
in the soberer, mainly agricultural civilization of the past, and among
the middling class of peopl