e the family ideal or its legal
bond or social outline back into the patriarchal form is to do the
utmost possible to bring on a catastrophic struggle between the new
and the old. The evil wrought by such reactionary teaching is in the
exact ratio of its power of influence. Whatever we may try to do, as
balance, through evolutionary methods at points where changes in form
have not been as yet made safe and sane by required adjustments of the
individual life to the new order, we should make haste to attempt. No
person, however, who is in actual touch with the movement of social
progress can hope to turn any great democratic tendency back upon
itself and "make that which hath been as if it were not." No truly
just person will wish to do so.

=The Prevalence of Divorce.=--Many urge reactionary attitudes toward
present family ideals and practice because of the divorce problem. The
omission of this from the list of causes for the modern instability of
the family and for its too frequent lack of success may have been
already noted and condemned by the reader of these pages. The fact of
divorces, however, whether they be many or few, is to the writer a
symptom, not a cause, the legal expression of a social disease, not
the disease itself. Bad diagnosis, or inadequate treatment on the
basis of a symptom, may increase the disease; and the facts concerning
divorce are of so serious a nature that a separate chapter has been
assigned to them under the heading: The Broken Family. The prevalence
of divorce, however, it must here be said, demonstrably proves two
things--one that men and women now feel themselves at moral and social
liberty to seek divorce when longer living together seems to them
intolerable, and that women are using their new freedom and economic
independence to make marriage conditions more to their liking. They
are setting a standard respecting desirable husbands, not always
wisely, often selfishly, but in the long run and large way to ends of
greater equality of demand in the marriage relation. The tendency on
the whole is toward a higher conception of what marriage should be and
what it should do for both parties in the bond. The statistics of
illegitimacy, of commercialized prostitution, of venereal disease, of
infant mortality, of early death or life-long invalidism of wives and
mothers, of marital unhappiness and parental neglect which are found
by honest investigation in states and nations in which no divorce