mental and physical troubles of continence in woman would be found in a recognized honorable system of free unions and trial-marriages, in which preventive intercourse is practiced until the lovers were old enough to become parents, and possessed of sufficient means to support a family.  The prospect of a loveless existence for young men and women of ardent natures is intolerable and as terrible as the prospect of painful illness and death.  But I think the old order must change ere long.”

In Teutonic countries there is a strongly marked current of feeling in the direction of establishing legal unions of a lower degree than marriage.  They exist in Sweden, as also in Norway where by a recent law the illegitimate child is entitled to the same rights in relation to both parents as the legitimate child, bearing the father’s name and inheriting his property (Die Neue Generation, July, 1909, p. 303).  In France the well-known judge, Magnard, so honorably distinguished for his attitude towards cases of infanticide by young mothers, has said:  “I heartily wish that alongside the institution of marriage as it now exists we had a free union constituted by simple declaration before a magistrate and conferring almost the same family rights as ordinary marriage.”  This wish has been widely echoed.

In China, although polygamy in the strict sense cannot properly be said to exist, the interests of the child, the woman, and the State are alike safeguarded by enabling a man to enter into a kind of secondary marriage with the mother of his child.  “Thanks to this system,” Paul d’Enjoy states (La Revue, Sept., 1905), “which allows the husband to marry the woman he desires, without being prevented by previous and undissolved unions, it is only right to remark that there are no seduced and abandoned girls, except such as no law could save from what is really innate depravity; and that there are no illegitimate children except those whose mothers are unhappily nearer to animals by their senses than to human beings by their reason and dignity.”

The new civil code of Japan, which is in many respects so advanced, allows an illegitimate child to be “recognized” by giving notice to the registrar; when a married man so recognizes a child, it appears, the child may be adopted by the wife as her own, though not actually rendered legitimate.  This state of things represents a transition stage; it can scarcely be said to recognize the rights of the “recognized” child’s mother.  Japan, it may be added, has adopted the principle of the automatic legitimation by marriage of the children born to the couple before marriage.

In Australia, where women possess a larger share than elsewhere in making and administering the laws, some attention is beginning to be given to the rights of illegitimate children.  Thus in South Australia, paternity may be proved before birth, and the father (by magistrate’s order)