ult of hearty eating,
which results in keeping a woman (mistress or maid) in the kitchen for
three or more hours that a man may eat for twenty or thirty minutes is
folly. The type of meal that either takes only a short time for
preparation and devices which render the attention of the housewife
unnecessary are ethical and healthy, both for the family and society.
The joys of the table are not to be despised, and only the dyspeptic or
the ascetic hold them in contempt; but simplicity in eating is the very
heart of the joy of the table.

Elaboration and gluttony are alike in this,--they increase the housework
and decrease the well-being of the diner.

How to maintain the sweetness of the family spirit of the home and yet
bring into it a wider social spirit, break down its isolated
individualistic character, is a problem I do not pretend to be able to
solve. Ancient nations emphasized the social-national aspect of life
overmuch, as for example the Spartans; the modern home overemphasizes
the family aspect. We must avoid extremes by clinging to the virtues and
correcting the vices of the home.

Alarmists are constantly raising the cry that marriage is declining and
that society is thereby threatened at its very heart. There is the
pessimist who feels that the "irreligion" of to-day is responsible;
there is the one who blames feminism; and there is the type that finds
in Democracy and liberalism generally the cause of the receding
old-fashioned morality. Divorce, late marriage, and child-restriction
are the manifestations of this decadence, and the press, the pulpit,
science, and the State all have taken notice of these modern phenomena,
though with widely differing attitudes.

That matrimony is changing cannot be questioned or denied. The main
change is that woman is entering more and more as an equal partner whose
rights the modern law recognizes as the ancient law did not. She is no
longer to be classed as exemplified by the famous words of Petruchio,
when he claimed his wife, the erstwhile shrew, as his property in
exactly the same sense as any domestic animal, linking the wife with the
horse, the cow, the ass, as the chattels of the man. The law agreed to
this attitude of the man, the Church supported it; woman, strangely
enough, seemed to glory in it.

With the rise of woman into the status of a human being (a revolution
not yet accomplished in entirety) the property relationship weakened but
lingers very strongl