d the laws
enforced by a social and economic community on the other. Always there
will tend to arise some who will desire to change the accepted
marriage form, those who, considering first the personal needs, will
advocate the loosening or the breaking of the marriage-bond; while
others, looking only to the stability which they believe to be founded
in law and custom, will seek to keep and to make the tie indissoluble.

This perpetual conflict is, it seems to me, the greatest difficulty
that has to be faced in any effort to readjust the conditions of
marriage. In our contemporary society there is a deep-lying
dissatisfaction with the existing relations of the sexes, a yearning
and restless need for change. In no other direction are the confusions
and uncertainty of the contemporary mind more manifest. The change
that has taken place so rapidly in the attitudes of women and men has
brought with it a very strong and, what seems to be a new, revolt
against the ignominious conditions of our amatory life as bound by
coercive monogamy. We are questioning where before we have accepted,
and are seeking out new ways in which mankind will go--will go because
it must.

Yet just because of this imperative urging the greater caution is
called for in introducing any changes in the laws or customs affecting
marriage. Present social and economic conditions are to a great extent
chaotic. It would be a sorry thing if in haste we were to establish
practices that must come to an end, when we have freed ourselves from
the present transition; changes that would not be for the welfare of
generations still unborn. It will, however, hardly be denied by any
one that reform is needed. All will admit that a change must be made
in some direction, and an attempt to say where it should be tried must
therefore be faced.

Does Nature give us any help in solving the problem? None whatever. It
would seem, indeed, that Nature has in some ways arranged the love
relation in regard to the needs of the two sexes very badly. But
putting this aside for the present, it is clear that in regard to the
form of marriage Nature has no preference; all ways are equal to her,
provided that the race profits by them, or at least does not suffer
too much from them. We found abundant proof of this in our examination
of marriage and the family as established already in the animal
kingdom; the modes of sexual association offer great variety, no
species being of necessity