her disciples. That she saw and lamented her error, that her writings deprecate it, that her painful clinging throughout life to the terms "husband," "wife," was an indirect admission of it, and her marriage, as life was closing, a final recantation of it-all this is less apparent to many than the fact that in earlier days she, the pure, the lofty, ay, the religious moralist, regarded the legal bond with indifference. Time and experience alone can counteract the fatal impulse imparted by her to the anti-marriage doctrines of the day. That they will counteract it those are bound to believe who hold that marriage-reform, not marriagerejection, must be the note of any progress which deserves the name; that the legal tie, so far from being repudiated, must be increasingly held in honour with the spread of moral enlightenment; and that the thesis of Kant will become ever more and more axiomatic: No union between the sexes is permissible, "except subject to the conditions of a particular legal contract (marriage) in which event two persons become mutually obliged to one another."

A word in conclusion upon the subject of divorce. "Increased facilities for obtaining a divorce," according to Mr Herbert Spencer, already suggest coming "reprobation of marital relations in which the union by affection has been dissolved" -that is to say, the marriage of the future, or whatever may be its equivalent, will not merely arise out of affection, but will cease the moment

that affection ceases. Love, if Mr Spencer's forecast be correct, is on the highroad to being formally endowed with the birthright of his wings. We are, to be sure, consoled with the reflection that by the time this state of things is reached, other changes will, pari passu, have taken place which will minimise its dangers. "The higher sentiments accompanying union of the sexes," which have been slowly maturing throughout the ages, may, we are reminded, "be expected to develop still more. So that the changes which may further facilitate divorce under certain conditions, are changes which will make those conditions more and more rare." Ill-assorted unions, we are presumably to understand, will seldom take place; conjugal tragedies will be of less frequent occurrence; permanent marriage will be a habit, and a tender loyalty an instinct.

The forecast, assuming its accuracy, does not release those of us who dread the present and immediate effect upon society of the facile dissolution of marriage from doing what we can to stem the prevailing current of opinion and of legislation.

A movement in this sense would probably gather strength rapidly. For already there are signs of reaction against the divorce mania which, in some countries, is threatening the actual existence of the family, and making marriage a byword. And ere long the truth will be forced upon us that

divorce means practically the relief of the comparatively few at the expense of the well-being of the many; the sacrifice of the State (which exists through the family) to the personal comfort of individuals. The modern spirit of revolt under discomfort, of impatience of suffering, even when notoriously self-caused, has hitherto blinded us to the clear duty of enduring private misfortune in the interest of the community, as well as to the madness of resorting to legal remedies for ills which only the gradual education of the race to nobler conceptions of its sex-relations can legitimately remove. While this education is proceeding, it is obvious that individuals will suffer, and suffer grievously. But that is the ineludible law of progress. And the sum of misery will probably be less where men and women are accustomed to regard marriage as indissoluble than where its dissolubility at will fosters the more frivoloustoo often the more criminal-forms of passion. It is scarcely conceivable that in a future which we are led to believe will differ happily from the present in the rarity of its loveless unions, the few will not learn altruism enough to acquiesce in their personal privations rather than risk the stability of what-in a profounder sense than the world has known as yet-they will regard as the sacrament of marriage. Is it not Tolstoi who, in his re-statement of the "second commandment of Jesus, has uttered the watchword of the future? "Let every man have one wife and every

* It is impossible to quote from the earlier religious writings of Tolstoi, as I have done more than once in these Essays, without a word in mournful deprecation of the Kreutzer Sonata, published (I think) since this and the following one were written. Without going so far as to attribute the views contained in this painful book, with Dr Max Nordau, to a definite form of mental disease; and while believing them to be capable of a much simpler explanation; it must, regretfully, be admitted that, however caused, they are false and morbid in the extreme. If adhered to, they would, of course, place the writer finally out of court as an authority on sex-questions.

The Decline of Divorce

"The timidity of our public opinion is our disease, or, shall I say, the absence of private opinion? The private mind has the access to the totality of goodness and truth, that it may be a balance to a corrupt society; and to stand for the private verdict against popular clamour is the office of the noble."

Emerson.