spensable;
but there is no reason why that natural tie should be made the excuse
for unnatural aggravations of it, as crushing to the parent as they are
oppressive to the child. The mother and father will not always have
to shoulder the burthen of maintenance which should fall on the Atlas
shoulders of the fatherland and motherland. Pending such reforms and
emancipations, a shattering break-up of the parental home must remain
one of the normal incidents of marriage. The parent is left lonely and
the child is not. Woe to the old if they have no impersonal interests,
no convictions, no public causes to advance, no tastes or hobbies! It is
well to be a mother but not to be a mother-in-law; and if men were cut
off artificially from intellectual and public interests as women are,
the father-in-law would be as deplorable a figure in popular tradition
as the mother-in-law.

It is not to be wondered at that some people hold that blood
relationship should be kept a secret from the persons related, and that
the happiest condition in this respect is that of the foundling who, if
he ever meets his parents or brothers or sisters, passes them by without
knowing them. And for such a view there is this to be said: that our
family system does unquestionably take the natural bond between members
of the same family, which, like all natural bonds, is not too tight to
be borne, and superimposes on it a painful burden of forced, inculcated,
suggested, and altogether unnecessary affection and responsibility which
we should do well to get rid of by making relatives as independent of
one another as possible.

The Fate of the Family

The difficulty of inducing people to talk sensibly about the family is
the same as that which I pointed out in a previous volume as
confusing discussions of marriage. Marriage is not a single invariable
institution: it changes from civilization to civilization, from religion
to religion, from civil code to civil code, from frontier to frontier.
The family is still more variable, because the number of persons
constituting a family, unlike the number of persons constituting a
marriage, varies from one to twenty: indeed, when a widower with a
family marries a widow with a family, and the two produce a third
family, even that very high number may be surpassed. And the conditions
may vary between opposite extremes: for example, in a London or Paris
slum every child adds to the burden of poverty and helps to star