were I to marry a whore, though my own, I should be ashamed of ever showing my face again.”  It cannot be said that Fielding’s satire is even yet out of date.  Thus in Prussia, according to Adele Schreiber ("Heirathsbeschraenkungen,” Die Neue Generation, Feb., 1909), it seems to be still practically impossible for a military officer to marry the mother of his own illegitimate child.

The glorification of the form at the expense of the reality of marriage has even been attempted in poetry by Tennyson in the least inspired of his works, The Idylls of the King.  In “Lancelot and Elaine” and “Guinevere” (as Julia Magruder points out, North American Review, April, 1905) Guinevere is married to King Arthur, whom she has never seen, when already in love with Lancelot, so that the “marriage” was merely a ceremony, and not a real marriage (cf., May Child, “The Weird of Sir Lancelot,” North American Review, Dec., 1908).

It may seem to some that so conservative an estimate of the tendencies of civilization in matters of sexual love is due to a timid adherence to mere tradition.  That is not the case.  We have to recognize that marriage is firmly held in position by the pressure of two opposing forces.  There are two currents in the stream of our civilization:  one that moves towards an ever greater social order and cohesion, the other that moves towards an ever greater individual freedom.  There is real harmony underlying the apparent opposition of these two tendencies, and each is indeed the indispensable complement of the other.  There can be no real freedom for the individual in the things that concern that individual alone unless there is a coherent order in the things that concern him as a social unit.  Marriage in one of its aspects only concerns the two individuals involved; in another of its aspects it chiefly concerns society.  The two forces cannot combine to act destructively on marriage, for the one counteracts the other.  They combine to support monogamy, in all essentials, on its immemorial basis.

It must be added that in the circumstances of monogamy that are not essential there always has been, and always must be, perpetual transformation.  All traditional institutions, however firmly founded on natural impulses, are always growing dead and rigid at some points and putting forth vitally new growths at other points.  It is the effort to maintain their vitality, and to preserve their elastic adjustment to the environment, which involves this process of transformation in non-essentials.

The only way in which we can fruitfully approach the question of the value of the transformations now taking place in our marriage-system is by considering the history of that system in the past.  In that way we learn the real significance of the marriage-system, and we understand what transformations are, or are not, associated with a fine civilization.  When we are acquainted with the changes of the past we are enabled to face more confidently the changes of the present.