The decline of a civilisation has always shown itself more markedly in the decline of the family life than elsewhere.  The family, not the individual, is the basis of the social state, and no amount of theorising can make the fact different.  Whatever assails the integrity of the family assails the life of the state, and no single family can be destroyed without society as a whole feeling the effect.  “What,” it is asked, “is to be done?  If two people find that they have blundered, are they to go on indefinitely suffering from the result of their blunder?  If an immature boy or girl in a moment of passion make a mistake as to their suitability to live together, are they to be compelled to do so at the expense of constant unhappiness?”

It would seem obvious to say that justice requires that those who make blunders should take the consequences of them; that those who create a situation involving suffering should do the suffering themselves and not attempt to pass it on to others.  It is not as though the consequences of the act can be avoided; they cannot.  What happens is that the incidence of them is shifted.  It is a part of the brutal egotism of divorce that it is quite willing to shift the incidence of the suffering that it has created on to the lives of wholly innocent people; in many cases upon children, in all cases upon society at large.  For it is necessary to emphasize the fact that society is a closely compact body:  so interwoven is life with life that if one member suffer the other members suffer with it.  Breaches of moral order are not individual matters but social.  This truth is implied in society’s constantly asserted right to regulate family relations in the general interest even after it has ceased to think of such relations as having any spiritual significance.  We need to-day a more vivid sense of the community lest we shall see all sense of a common life engulfed in the rising tide of individual anarchism.  We need the assertion in energetic form of the right of the community as supreme over the right of the individual.  We must deny the right of the individual to pursue his own way and his own pleasure at the expense of the rights of others.  And to his insolent question, “Why should I suffer in an intolerable situation?” we must plainly answer:  “Because you are responsible for the situation, and it is intolerable that you should be permitted to throw off the results of your wickedness or your stupidity upon other and innocent people.”

And it is quite clear that should society assert its pre-eminent right in unmistakable form and make it evident that it does not propose to tolerate the results of the egotistic nonsense of self-determination and the right of every one to live his own life, the evils of divorce and of shattered families would presently shrink to relatively small proportions.  The present facility of divorce encourages thoughtless and unsuitable marriages in the first place; and in the second place,