unt for less and less as a state and for more
and more as a personal relationship. It is likely to be an affair of
diminishing public and increasing private importance. People who marry
are likely to remain, so far as practical ends go, more detached and
separable. The essential link will be the love and affection and not the
home.

With that go certain logical consequences. The first is that the
circumstances of the unmarried mother will resemble more than they have
hitherto done those of many married mothers; the harsh lines once drawn
between them will dissolve. This will fall in with the long manifest
tendency in modern society to lighten the disadvantages (in the case of
legacy duties, for example) and stigma laid upon illegitimate children.
And a type of marriage where personal compatibility has come to be
esteemed the fundamental thing will be altogether more amenable to
divorce than the old union which was based upon the kitchen and the
nursery, and the absence of any care, education, or security for
children beyond the range of the parental household. Marriage will not
only be lighter, but more dissoluble.

To summarise all that has gone before, this war is accelerating rather
than deflecting the stream of tendency, and is bringing us rapidly to a
state of affairs in which women will be much more definitely independent
of their sexual status, much less hampered in their self-development,
and much more nearly equal to men than has ever been known before in the
whole history of mankind....

IX. THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE

Section 1

In this chapter it is proposed to embark upon what may seem now, with
the Great War still in progress and still undecided, the most hopeless
of all prophetic adventures. This is to speculate upon the redrawing of
the map of Europe after the war. But because the detailed happenings and
exact circumstances of the ending of the war are uncertain, they need
not alter the inevitable broad conclusion. I have already discussed that
conclusion, and pointed out that the war has become essentially a war of
mutual exhaustion. This does not mean, as some hasty readers may assume,
that I foretell a "draw." We may be all white and staggering, but
Germany is, I believe, fated to go down first. She will make the first
advances towards peace; she will ultimately admit defeat.

But I do want to insist that by that time every belligerent, and not
simply Germany, will be exhausted to a pitch of