could not help him in his _delectus_, but the
modern father is not so puzzled when his son wishes to converse of
railway finance. The parent, more capable of comradeship, has come to
want to be a comrade. He is no longer addressed as "sir"; he is often
addressed as "old chap." That is fine, but it is in dead opposition to
the close, hard family idea.

Likewise, man and wife have come to look upon each other rather
differently; not differently enough, but then humanity never does
anything enough; when it comes near to anything drastic it grows afraid.
Man still thinks that "whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing", but
he is no longer finding the one he sought not so long ago. She is no
longer his property, and it would not occur to the roughest among us to
offer a wife for sale for five shillings in Smithfield market, as was
done now and then as late as the early nineteenth century. Woman is no
longer property; she has been freed; in England she has even been
allowed, by the Married Women's Property Act, to hold that which was her
own. The Married Women's Property Act has modified the attitude of the
mother to her child and to her husband. She is less linked when she has
property, for she can go. If every woman had means, or a trade of her
own, we should have achieved something like free alliance; woman would
be in the position of the woman in "Pygmalion", whom her man could not
beat because, she not being married to him, if he beat her she might
leave him--in its way a very strong argument against marriage.

But most women have no property, and yet, somehow, by the slow loosening
of family links, they have gained some independence. I am not talking of
America, where men have deposited their liberty and their fortunes into
the prettiest, the greediest, the most ruthless hands in the world; but
rather of England, where for a long time a man set up in life with a dog
as a friend, a wife to exercise it, and a cat to catch the mice. Until
recently the householder kept a tight hand upon domestic expenditure; he
paid all the bills, inspected the weekly accounts with a fierce air and
an internal hope that he understood them; rent, taxes, heat, light,
furniture, repairs, servants' wages, school fees--he saw to it that
every penny was accounted for and then, when pleased, gave his wife a
tip to go and buy herself a ribbon with. (There are still a great many
men who cannot think of anything a woman may want except a ribbon; in