And I take up this position because I believe in the family as the justification of marriage.  Marriage to me is no mystical and eternal union, but a practical affair, to be judged as all practical things are judged—­by its returns in happiness and human welfare.  And directly we pass from the mists and glamours of amorous passion to the warm realities of the nursery, we pass into a new system of considerations altogether.  We are no longer considering A. in relation to Mrs. A., but A. and Mrs. A. in relation to an indefinite number of little A.’s, who are the very life of the State in which they live.  Into the case of Mr. A. v.  Mrs. A. come Master A. and Miss A. intervening.  They have the strongest claim against both their parents for love, shelter and upbringing, and the legislator and statesman, concerned as he is chiefly with the future of the community, has the strongest reasons for seeing that they get these things, even at the price of considerable vexation, boredom or indignity to Mr. and Mrs. A. And here it is that there arises the rational case against free and frequent divorce and the general unsettlement and fluctuation of homes that would ensue.

At this point we come to the verge of a jungle of questions that would demand a whole book for anything like a complete answer.  Let us try as swiftly and simply as possible to form a general idea at least of the way through.  Remember that we are working upward from Mr. Shaw’s question of “Why not separate at the choice of either party?” We have got thus far, that no two people who do not love each other should be compelled to live together, except where the welfare of their children comes in to override their desire to separate, and now we have to consider what may or may not be for the welfare of the children.  Mr. Shaw, following the late Samuel Butler, meets this difficulty by the most extravagant abuse of parents.  He would have us believe that the worst enemies a child can have are its mother and father, and that the only civilised path to citizenship is by the incubator, the creche, and the mixed school and college.  In these matters he is not only ignorant, but unfeeling and unsympathetic, extraordinarily so in view of his great capacity for pity and sweetness in other directions and of his indignant hatred of cruelty and unfairness, and it is not necessary to waste time in discussing what the common experience confutes Neither is it necessary to fly to the other extreme, and indulge in preposterous sentimentalities about the magic of fatherhood and a mother’s love.  These are not magic and unlimited things, but touchingly qualified and human things.  The temperate truth of the matter is that in most parents there are great stores of pride, interest, natural sympathy, passionate love and devotion which can be tapped in the interests of the children and the social future, and that it is the mere commonsense of statecraft to use their resources to the utmost.  It does