a religious view of marriage.

To-day we need a new consciousness of our social and racial
responsibilities, the idea of handing down at least as much as we have
received. Let the young women of England learn as a great new faith
that the sons and daughters they bear are not their children and the
children of their husbands only, but the sons and daughters of
England--the inheritors of all the fine traditions of our race. Let us
spread the new romance of Love's responsibility to Life; let us honor
ideals of self-dedication to our husbands, understanding their
dependence upon us, to our homes, to our sons and our daughters, to our
race, its great ones and their deeds; our moral obligations to all
children even before they are born.

It is women, and they alone, who can save marriage; they hold all life
in their hands. Never before in the world has the opportunity been so
vast; it is a fearful thing to find oneself among realities. To you, who
to-day are young, negligence no longer is possible. Listen to what I
tell you: those heroes who have died for this England of ours cry to you
for children to hold their memories and make their lives everlasting.

Let us take seriously what the politicians have said without meaning it:
let us make an England fit for heroes to be born in, able to mold a
character of heroism in each of its children: not, as at present, an
England so tainted with mean self-assertion that the dedication of a
wife to her husband, of a mother to her children, counts as a sacrifice
of her personality.[80:1]

FOOTNOTES:

[80:1] In order to guard myself from possible misunderstanding, I would
wish to give the following explanation: the chief section of this essay
on Marriage is devoted to praise of the Jewish ideal of marriage as a
religious duty. It does not profess to examine the detailed working out
of the ideal in connection with the definite regulations of traditional
Judaism. That working out is, naturally, to the modern mind more or less
faulty. It is as an ideal that I give it: an ideal of service and
dedication that I want to be carried into English marriage, and to serve
the needs of our national life. I would, however, make it clear that the
detailed proposals put forward by me in the essays that follow have no
connection with Judaism: no one of them could possibly be considered to
have any such connection, except the proposal for facilitated divorce,
but my proposal in that particular conne