e, at any rate, has sufficed, there comes
the great development of associations and tendernesses that arises out
of intimate co-operation in an established home, and particularly out of
the linking love and interest of children's lives....

But how does this fit into the childless, disunited, and probably
shifting _menage_ of our second picture?

It must be borne in mind that it has been the middling and lower mass of
people, the tenants and agriculturists, the shopkeepers, and so forth,
men needing before all things the absolutely loyal help of wives, that
has sustained permanent monogamic marriage whenever it has been
sustained. Public monogamy has existed on its merits--that is, on the
merits of the wife. Merely ostensible reasons have never sufficed. No
sort of religious conviction, without a real practical utility, has ever
availed to keep classes of men, unhampered by circumstances, to its
restrictions. In all times, and holding all sorts of beliefs, the
specimen humanity of courts and nobilities is to be found developing the
most complex qualifications of the code. In some quiet corner of Elysium
the bishops of the early Georges, the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the
contemporary French and Spanish courts, the patriarchs of vanished
Byzantium, will find a common topic with the spiritual advisers of the
kingdoms of the East in this difficult theme,--the theme of the
concessions permissible and expedient to earnest believers encumbered
with leisure and a superfluity of power.... It is not necessary to
discuss religious development, therefore, before deciding this issue. We
are dealing now with things deeper and forces infinitely more powerful
than the mere convictions of men.

Will a generation to whom marriage will be no longer necessarily
associated with the birth and rearing of children, or with the immediate
co-operation and sympathy of husband and wife in common proceedings,
retain its present feeling for the extreme sanctity of the permanent
bond? Will the agreeable, unemployed, childless woman, with a high
conception of her personal rights, who is spending her husband's
earnings or income in some pleasant discrepant manner, a type of woman
there are excellent reasons for anticipating will become more
frequent--will she continue to share the honours and privileges of the
wife, mother, and helper of the old dispensation? and in particular,
will the great gulf that is now fixed by custom between her and the