ound in the family; and the best ingenuity cannot improve much
upon it.

IV

THE HOME

"In respect to the powers and rights of married women, the law is by
no means abreast of the spirit of the age. Here are seen the old
fossil footprints of feudalism. The law relating to woman tends to
make every family a barony or a monarchy or a despotism, of which
the husband is the baron, king, or despot, and the wife the
dependent, serf, or slave. That this is not always the fact, is not
due to the law, but to the enlarged humanity which spurns the narrow
limits of its rules. The progress of civilization has changed the
family from a barony to a republic; but the law has not kept pace
with the advance of ideas, manners, and customs."--W.W. STORY'S
Treatise on Contracts not under Seal, sec. 84, third edition, p. 89.

WANTED--HOMES

We see advertisements, occasionally, of "Homes for Aged Women," and more
rarely "Homes for Aged Men." The question sometimes suggests itself,
whether it would not be better to begin the provision earlier, and see that
homes are also provided, in some form, for the middle-aged and even the
young. The trouble is, I suppose, that as it takes two to make a bargain,
so it takes at least two to make a home; and unluckily it takes only one to
spoil it.

Madame Roland once defined marriage as an institution where one person
undertakes to provide happiness for two; and many failures are accounted
for, no doubt, by this false basis. Sometimes it is the man, more often the
woman, of whom this extravagant demand is made. There are marriages which
have proved a wreck almost wholly through the fault of the wife. Nor is
this confined to wedded homes alone. I have known a son who lived alone,
patiently and uncomplainingly, with that saddest of all conceivable
companions, a drunken mother. I have known another young man who supported
in his own home a mother and sister, both habitual drunkards. All these
were American-born, and all of respectable social position. A house
shadowed by such misery is not a home, though it might have proved such but
for the sins of women. Such instances are, however, rare and occasional
compared with the cases where the same offence in the husband makes ruin of
the home.

Then there are the cases where indolence, or selfishness, or vanity, or the
love of social excitement, in the woman, unfits her for home life. Here we
come upon