ed us by devious
ways into religious freedom where men can worship as they will.

Of all these older institutions, shaped under iron necessity, the only
one that remains practically unchanged is the family. Dealing with the
most powerful of all our human hungers, as it does, we have not dared to
make it fit our modern life. Not only is this true, but the forces of
the older state and church which survived, fastened themselves upon this
institution and strengthened its resisting power. The church
increasingly made marriage into a holy sacrament, so that it not only
protected lovers, but became a subtle, inviolable and indissoluble
mystery. The state sanctioned the family, and made it an instrument for
regulating political and property rights. Formal society proclaimed the
family and made it the standard for respectability.

Two centuries hence, our family, with its sacramental significances, its
lack of a eugenic conscience, its financial subordination of women, its
frequent lack of love and sympathy, its primogeniture, and its
determining power over social opportunity, will be as incomprehensible
to students of institutional forms as the Holy Roman Empire is to us
to-day. Who will then understand how church and state could have
licensed and consummated marriages between young and inexperienced
people, marriages which were to be binding on their thought, feeling and
action for life without requiring some time, however brief, between the
application for a license and the final binding of vows? Who will be
able to understand how church and state could have sanctioned marriage
between a broken-down old noble and a young and inexperienced girl of
seventeen? How will the future student explain the fact that in New
Jersey state and church combined to sanction and bless the marriage of
an imbecile woman and of her offspring until they had produced 148
feeble-minded children to curse the state.[50]

[50] See _The Kalikak Family_, by HERBERT H. GODDARD, New York:
Macmillan Company, 1912.

Who will then understand why a man and woman who had not only ceased to
love each other but had come to feel a deep repugnance for each other
should have been compelled to share bed and board, even when there were
no children, until even murder seemed preferable to such slavery of soul
and body? How can this student understand woman's economic dependence,
her uncertain income, her insecure rights in property for which she
toiled side by side