will
place on both alike the obligation of adequate fulfilment of the
duties to their child. This, I believe, the State must enforce. If
inability on the part of the parents to make such provision is proved,
the State must step in with some wide and fitting scheme of insurance
of childhood. The carrying out of even these simple demands will lead
us a great step forward in practical morality. It will open up the way
to a saner and more beautiful future.

But here, in case I am mistaken and thought to be desiring the
loosening of the bonds between the sexes, I must repeat again how
firmly I accept marriage as the best, the happiest, and the most
practical form of the sexual association. The ideal union is, I am
certain, an indestructible bond, trebly woven of inclination, duty,
and convenience. Marriage is an institution older than any existing
society, older than mankind, and reaches back, as Fabre's study of
insects has so beautifully shown us, to an infinitely remote past. Its
forms are, therefore, too fundamentally blended with human and,
further back, with animal society for them to be shaken with theories,
or even the practices of individuals or groups of individuals. Thus I
accept marriage: I believe that its form must be regulated and cannot
be left to the development of individual desires against the needs of
the race.

There are some who, in seeking liberation from the ignominious
conditions of our present amatory life, are wishing to rid marriage
from all legal bonds, and are pointing to Free-love as the way of
escape. To me this seems a very great mistake. I admit the splendid
imaginative appeal in the idea of Love's freedom as it is put forward,
for instance, by the great Swedish feminist, Ellen Key; I am unable to
accept it as practical morality. This, I believe, should be the only
sound basis for reform. The real question is not what people _ought
to do_, but what they _actually do_ and are likely _to go on doing_.
It is these facts that the idealist fails to face. Love is a very
mixed game indeed. And all that the wisest reformer has ever been able
to do is to make bad guesses at the solution of its problems.

The fundamental principle of the new ideal morality is that love and
marriage must always coincide, and, therefore, when love ceases the
bond should be broken. This in theory is, of course, right. I doubt if
it is, or ever will be, possible in practice. Experience has forced
the knowledge that th