lives, with long hours on their hands which they
cannot fill, with the inevitable results, the nauseating record of
filth, disease and abominations too utterly loathsome even to think
about--war, which is the curse of the poor and unfortunate, consuming
the energies of men and the material means whereby their unhappy lot
might be alleviated--war, the hard, cruel, relentless, inexorable
monster of unregenerate man's creation--we, since no pope, bishop or
priest will do it--we execrate it in the name of all we hold holiest,
in the name of reason, morality and religion, and we pledge ourselves
so to act, privately and politically, as to promote such measures--a
federation of all English-speaking nations of the earth, if that will
serve the purpose, or any other method equally or more serviceable--as
will finally exorcise this last of the besetting demons of humanity,
and fulfil thereby the "sweet dream" of our master and inspirer,
Immanuel Kant.

Ring out the old, ring in the new;
* * * * *
Ring out the false, ring in the true;
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old;
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

[1] Since these words were written the _Daily Chronicle_ of 10th
September, 1898, quotes them as having been used by a distinguished
living English general.

XI.

THE ETHICS OF MARRIAGE.

There is probably no department of morality in which a metaphysic of
ethic is more conspicuously needed than in that which concerns
marriage. The insurrection of woman against the disabilities to which
her sex was in the past unjustly subjected, due perhaps more to custom
and tradition than to the statute law of the land, has developed in
more recent times into a serious attack on the central institution of
civilised life, on that fundamental fact of Nature on which posterity
and society repose. We have had an outbreak in literature culminating
in the giddy glory of the "hill-top novel," with its heroine "who did,"
and in America what is tautologically described as the "Free-Love
Society" was founded to propagate the truth of what Rousseau
euphemistically describes as _mariage apres la nature_. For all that,
however, one seems to hear less of the "hill-top" species, and
possibly--with the problem play, without which no theatre was complete
a couple of years ago--it may be fading into the mist of the past. It