to legal marriage, and as the outcome of deliberate
will and resolution. In these and many similar proposals in detail, set
forth in her earlier books, it is clear that Ellen Key has sometimes
gone beyond the mandate of her central conviction, that love is the
first condition for increasing the vitality alike of the race and of the
individuality, and that the question of love, properly considered, is
the question of creating the future man. As she herself has elsewhere
quite truly pointed out, practice must precede, and precede by a very
long time, the establishment of definite rules in matters of detail.

It will be noticed that a point with which Ellen Key and the leaders of
the new German woman's movement specially concern themselves is the
affectional needs of the "supernumerary" woman and the legitimation of
her children. There is an excess of women over men, in Germany as in
most other countries. That excess, it is said, is balanced by the large
number of women who do not wish to marry. But that is too cheap a
solution of the question. Many women may wish to remain unmarried, but
no woman wishes to be forced to remain unmarried. Every woman, these
advocates of the rights of women claim, has a right to motherhood, and
in exercising the right under sound conditions she is benefiting
society. But our marriage system, in the rigid form which it has long
since assumed, has not now the elasticity necessary to answer these
demands. It presents a solution which is often impossible, always
difficult, and perhaps in a large proportion of cases undesirable. But
for a woman who is shut out from marriage to grasp at the vital facts of
love and motherhood which she perhaps regards, unreasonably or not, as
the supreme things in the world, must often be under such conditions a
disastrous step, while it is always accompanied by certain risks.
Therefore, it is asked, why should there not be, as of old there was, a
relationship established which while of less dignity than marriage, and
less exclusive in its demands, should yet permit a woman to enter into
an honourable, open, and legally recognized relationship with a man?
Such a relationship a woman could proclaim to the whole world, if
necessary, without reflecting any disesteem upon herself or her child,
while it would give her a legal claim on her child's father. Such a
relationship would be substantially the same as the ancient concubinate,
which persisted even in Christendom up