timate" through no act of their own, no one can say that the
recognition has come too soon. As yet, indeed, it seems nowhere to be
complete.

Most attempts or proposals for the avoidance of illegitimate
births are concerned with the legalizing of unions of a less
binding degree than the present legal marriage. Such unions would
serve to counteract other evils. Thus an English writer, who has
devoted much study to sex questions, writes in a private letter:
"The best remedy for the licentiousness of celibate men and the
mental and physical troubles of continence in woman would be
found in a recognized honorable system of free unions and
trial-marriages, in which preventive intercourse is practiced
until the lovers were old enough to become parents, and possessed
of sufficient means to support a family. The prospect of a
loveless existence for young men and women of ardent natures is
intolerable and as terrible as the prospect of painful illness
and death. But I think the old order must change ere long."

In Teutonic countries there is a strongly marked current of
feeling in the direction of establishing legal unions of a lower
degree than marriage. They exist in Sweden, as also in Norway
where by a recent law the illegitimate child is entitled to the
same rights in relation to both parents as the legitimate child,
bearing the father's name and inheriting his property (_Die Neue
Generation_, July, 1909, p. 303). In France the well-known judge,
Magnard, so honorably distinguished for his attitude towards
cases of infanticide by young mothers, has said: "I heartily wish
that alongside the institution of marriage as it now exists we
had a free union constituted by simple declaration before a
magistrate and conferring almost the same family rights as
ordinary marriage." This wish has been widely echoed.

In China, although polygamy in the strict sense cannot properly
be said to exist, the interests of the child, the woman, and the
State are alike safeguarded by enabling a man to enter into a
kind of secondary marriage with the mother of his child. "Thanks
to this system," Paul d'Enjoy states (_La Revue_, Sept., 1905),
"which allows the husband to marry the woman he desires, without
being prevented by previous and undissolved unions, it is only
right to remark that there are no seduced a