I would not say that children are, in the main, better served by successive marriages due to changes of temperament, because I do not know, but I can truly say that I am fairly well satisfied, from my personal observation, that they are no worse served. In the first place the fate of the modern child is not nearly so much in the hands of individual parents as it is in those of the state, the public schools and their teachers, the newspapers and their editors, the judges of courts and public and private citizens generally; for the modern child can almost say to-day that the state is both my father and my mother and it will take care of me. When it can really say this we will be much better off, for we are all going to be happier. The extremes of misery in childhood are going to be done away with.

In the next place it is a part of my personal observation that children of warring or troubled homes, where they are made to endure them, are worse off than are those who have escaped through fracture and been thrown on their own resources or are assisted by the charity of the state, or relatives, or the citizens of the country generally, to say nothing of the love or obligation of one or both of the separated parents. There is a deal too much sentiment attaching to the home as such to-day, sentiment not justified by facts. All homes are not ideal rearing-places for children, by any means. Consider the vast factory communities everywhere, too easily forgotten by the comfortable intellectual classes, and again the slums. The homes in these are, if one were to pay strict attention to the moralist, as ideal rearing-places for children as any other; yet we know that life offers pits of horror as well as abodes of sweetness and light in the guise of the modern so-called home. Again, it should be remembered that the home was made for man, not man for the home, and when the home fails as a vehicle of comfort and aid it should be done away with. It is, after all, only wood or stone or plaster, an economic convenience at best. And, anyhow, where the heart is is home, though it be a bed under the open sky or in a new lodging-house every hour. And this generalization is not intended to exclude children either. The children of troubled warring homes live in a kind of hell of temperament from which they are glad enough to escape as they grow older, and from which they evolve the dream of building something better for themselves, for they realize the horror of the thing they have endured.

The basic reason for destroying many a home is that the children may not be injured. All life administers its sternest reprimands to those who abuse children. Life loves children. It really prefers them to their elders—the biologic process so does. There is a public obligation to them which we all acknowledge. But this is not to say that all parents should therefore be compelled to rear their children. It may well be that they are not fitted economically or mentally or otherwise so to do. Their whole duty is, or might well be, done when they support them properly. The state should do the rest, for, as I have just suggested, most people are not fit to rear their children; and I say this with the greatest respect for the human and very charming impulse which causes them to wish to. The intellectual standards of the average individual are not much; those of the state are in the main better and should and may be trusted to do better by the children than any of millions of parents.

V

Under what circumstance is divorce justifiable?

When there is inharmony, schism, and in consequence bitter contention. I recommend this question, first, to the religious dogmatists of all creeds; second, to the anarchists, socialists and economic thinkers generally. They represent purely individual, and to them justifiable, points of view. Hence the world’s collection of dogmatic and radical literature.

VI

What is the key to making marriage do its work in the world?

???? Unchanging love possibly, or an ingrowing and harmonious sense of duty. Without Napoleonic skill or tact, however, I fear me much even then, and so would end with——

???????