ll be written." If I may make a
personal reference, I would say that it affected me more deeply than
any other scientific book that I have read. Although it is perfectly
easy to understand, and free from the slightest technicality, it is
the most misunderstood book in English literature, simply because it
is _not_ read. The current notion about it is utterly false. It might
be a powerful instrument of education, general and sociological, but
publishers will not reprint it--at least, they do not. And yet it is
forty times more interesting and four hundred times more educational
than Gilbert White's remarks on the birds of Selborne. I will leave
you to guess what "X" is, but I do not offer a prize for the solution
of a problem which a vast number of my readers will certainly solve at
once.

If those who are worrying themselves about the change in our system of
marriage would read "X," they would probably cease from worrying. For
they would perceive that they had been putting the cart before the
horse; that they had elevated to the dignity of fundamental principles
certain average rules of conduct which had sprung solely from certain
average instincts in certain average conditions, and that they were
now frightened because, the conditions having changed, the rules of
conduct had changed with them. One of the truths that "X" makes clear
is that conduct conforms to conditions, and not conditions to conduct.

The payment of taxes is a duty which the citizen owes to the state.
Marriage, with the begetting of children, is not a duty which the
citizen owes to the state. Marriage, with its consequences, is a
matter of personal inclination and convenience. It never has been
anything else, and it never will be anything else. How could it be
otherwise? If a man goes against inclination and convenience in a
matter where inclination is "of the essence of the contract," he
merely presents the state with a discontented citizen (if not two) in
exchange for a contented one! The happiness of the state is the sum of
the happiness of all its citizens; to decrease one's own happiness,
then, is a singular way of doing one's duty to the state! Do you
imagine that when people married early and much they did so from a
sense of duty to the state--a sense of duty which our "modern luxury"
has weakened? I imagine they married simply because it suited 'em.
They married from sheer selfishness, as all decent people do marry.
And do those who clatter