this subject, but I may state that I
believe that continence beyond these ages becomes increasingly
difficult, that immorality is encouraged, that adaptability becomes
lessened, and that wiser selection of mates does _not_ occur. But how
bring about early marriages in a time when the luxuries seem to have
become necessities, and therefore the necessity of marriage is eyed more
and more as an extravagance of the foolhardy? How bring about early
marriage when women are earning pay almost equal to that of the men and
are therefore more reluctant to enter matrimony unless at a high
standard of living. The late marriage is an evil, but how it can be
displaced by the early marriage under the present social scheme I do not
see.

We have considered divorce before this. It is not an evil but a symptom
of evil; not a disease in itself. It cannot be lessened or abolished
unless we are willing to state that a man and a woman should live
together as husband and wife, hating, despising, or fearing one another.
We cannot countenance brutality, unfaithfulness, or temperamental
mismating. It is true that divorces are often obtained for trivial
reasons, but usually the partners are not adapted to one another,
according to modern ways of thinking and feeling. What is commonplace
in one age is cruelty in the next, and this is a matter not of argument
but of expectation and feeling.

Nothing more need be said of contraceptive measures than this: they are
inevitably increasing in use and soon will be part of the average
marriage. Society must recognize this, and the lawmakers must legalize
what they themselves practise.

Matrimony, the home, woman, these are nodal points in the network of our
human lives. But they are not fixed centers, and the great weaver, Time,
changes the design constantly. Through them run the threads of the great
instincts, of tradition, of economic change, of the ideas, ideals, and
activities of man the restless. Man will always love woman, woman will
always love man; children will be born and reared, and sex conflict,
maladjustment, will always be secondary to these great facts. How men
and women will live together, how they will arrange for the children,
will be questions that women will help the world answer as well as their
mates. That the main trend of things is for better, more ethical, more
just relationship, I do not doubt. The secondary, most noisy changes
are perhaps evil, the main primary change is good.