nd the victims of contagious diseases.

The same truth applies to marriage. The right of freely dissolving the
tie, which was recognized in primitive society, has been gradually
replaced by the absolute formulae of theology and mysticism which fancy
that the "free will" can settle the destiny of a person by a
monosyllable pronounced at a time when the physical equilibrium is as
unstable as it is during courtship and at marriage. Later on the
reversion to the spontaneous and primitive form of a union based on
mutual consent imposes itself on men, and the matrimonial union, with
the increase in the frequency and facility of divorce, reverts to its
original forms and restores to the family, that it to say to the social
cell, a healthier constitution.

This some phenomenon may be traced in the organization of property.
Spencer himself has been forced to recognize that there has been an
inexorable tendency to a reversion to primitive collectivism since
ownership in land, at first a family attribute, then industrial, as he
has himself demonstrated, has reached its culminating point, so that in
some countries (Torrens act in Australia) land has become a sort of
_personal_ property, transferable as readily as a share in a
stock-company.

Read as proof what such an _individualist_ as Herbert Spencer has
written:

"At first sight it seems fairly inferable that the absolute ownership of
land by private persons, must be the _ultimate_ state which
industrialism brings about. But though industrialism has thus far tended
to individualize possession of land, while individualizing all other
possession, _it may be doubted whether the final stage is at present
reached_. Ownership established by force does not stand on the same
footing as ownership established by contract, and though multiplied
sales and purchases, treating the two ownerships in the same way, have
tacitly assimilated them, the assimilation may eventually be denied. The
analogy furnished by assumed rights of possession over human beings,
helps us to recognize this possibility. For while prisoners of war,
taken by force and held as property in a vague way (being at first much
on a footing with other members of a household), were reduced more
definitely to the form of property when the buying and selling of slaves
became general; and while it might, centuries ago, have been thence
inferred that the ownership of man by man was an ownership in course of
being permanently e