difficult for a person to find fulfilment for a
score of his personal needs in another personality.

In earlier times, too, the individual reached such maturity as he or she
was to attain much earlier than now, when education has become a
life-long process. Once united, there was comparatively little danger
that passing years would develop latent tastes that might prove
dissimilar. To-day, complete union at twenty may mean many oppositions
at forty, if each half of the unit goes on developing its powers. And we
must add to this individual complexity and slower development of the
present-day men and women the intense self-consciousness of modern times
which makes it impossible for us to forget our conditions and go on
living in a world once significant and true but now empty or false.

A second cause for the unrest of the present is doubtless to be found in
the inflexibility of the institution of the family, under which lovers
are allowed to live together and bring into existence the children of
their love. The family, as we have it, was shaped under the stress of
mediaeval disorder. In such a time men are willing to pay any price for
peace and quiet. And so the barbarian invaders, living among the broken
fragments of Greek and Roman civilization, gradually shaped feudalism,
culminating in absolute monarchy, which gave them political security.
They shaped the Holy Roman Catholic Church that they might worship in
peace. They shaped the guilds that they might work quietly, and enjoy
the fruits of their labors. The family, with its civil and
ecclesiastical sanctions, was formed to protect the personal lives of
men and women who wished to live together and rear children.

But with peace, life grew stronger and more intense; and the bonds which
the people had shaped, and which had given them security, reached their
limits of growth, became painful, and threatened to prevent all further
development. The rising cities bought their freedom from feudal lords;
even the serfs won better conditions; and the rising national units beat
down the older political institutions with their swords. Finally the
movements that gather around the French Revolution opened the way for us
into the democratic freedom and security which we enjoy to-day. The
guilds were broken up and a measure of freedom was secured, though the
industrial institution which shall give us freedom and security in our
work is yet to be formed. The Protestant Revolution l