ve and partial advantage
underlying the abuses they tolerate (as happens where slavery or
nepotism is prevalent), but when on the other hand no reason is
perceived for the good laws which are established (as when law is based
on revelation). The effort to adjust old institutions suddenly to felt
needs may not always be prudent, because the needs most felt may not be
the deepest, yet so far as it goes the effort is intelligent.

[Sidenote: The family tamed.]

The family in a barbarous age remains sacrosanct and traditional;
nothing in its law, manners, or ritual is open to amendment. The
unhappiness which may consequently overtake individuals is hushed up or
positively blamed, with no thought of tinkering with the holy
institutions which are its cause. Civilised men think more and cannot
endure objectless tyrannies. It is inevitable, therefore, that as
barbarism recedes the family should become more sensitive to its
members' personal interests. Husband and wife, when they are happily
matched, are in liberal communities more truly united than before,
because such closer friendship expresses their personal inclination.
Children are still cared for, because love of them is natural, but they
are ruled less and sooner suffered to choose their own associations.
They are more largely given in charge to persons not belonging to the
family, especially fitted to supply their education. The whole, in a
word, exists more and more for the sake of the parts, and the closeness,
duration, and scope of family ties comes to vary greatly in different
households. Barbaric custom, imposed in all cases alike without respect
of persons, yields to a regimen that dares to be elastic and will take
pains to be just.

[Sidenote: Possible readjustments and reversions.]

How far these liberties should extend and where they would pass into
license and undermine rational life, is another question. The pressure
of circumstances is what ordinarily forces governments to be absolute.
Political liberty is a sign of moral and economic independence. The
family may safely weaken its legal and customary authority so long as
the individual can support and satisfy himself. Children evidently never
can; consequently they must remain in a family or in some artificial
substitute for it which would be no less coercive. But to what extent
men and women, in a future age, may need to rely on ties of
consanguinity or marriage in order not to grow solitary, purposeles