ity, are a step higher in social development than were
the alliances of the old regime, where a man's social or domestic
exigencies required a wife or a housekeeper, or both-in-one; where
woman must marry whomsoever asked her, or be pitied and scorned as an
"old maid," still affinity-marriages are not the final union, and must
go through an evolutionary phase.

Affinity-marriages are eligible to disruption. Happily, we trust,
these disruptions will in the course of time be devoid of hatred and
mutual recriminations and abuse. Certainly they will be, as they
evolve from the plane of sense-consciousness to that of intellectual
affinities. Moreover, they stand a much better chance of permanency
than has maintained during the past, before the word affinity was
heard so frequently as it is now.

The general impression is abroad in the land, that it is only since
women became economically independent that disruption of the marriage
bonds has become so general. It is true that divorces are much more
frequent since women have become, to a great extent, economically
independent; but that only means that the parties to the marriage have
been set free. The disruptions are not more, it is only the evidences.
And it is at the _evidence_ of marital unhappiness that all the
criticism is directed.

If the criticism were directed against the condition that divorce
tells us of, instead of against the divorce itself, the first aid to
the injured would be to establish a social order wherein an equal
moral standard for both sexes should be the rule, and where a mother
is recognized, and respected and honored in the name of motherhood,
whether she is a wife or not.

This suggestion will of course be met with a shocked gasp from many.
The cry that "Society will be disorganized" and our "moral code become
chaotic" will go up from the self-constituted keepers of public
morality. But is our morality so tender that it needs protection? Are
our social conditions so ideal that they cannot be improved? If they
are, then nothing can besmirch them. If they are not, they must first
be demolished, before they are rebuilt.

The limited mortal mind is always terribly afraid of a change. Not one
single improvement has ever been suggested, from mechanics to morals,
that has not been met with that ever-ready fear-thought, that the
whole universe is going to the eternal bow-wows, if the slightest
change in established institutions is made. And despite i