provides lodging for one month before and after birth, as well as nurse, doctor, and clothing, furnishing security that he will do so; after birth, at the magistrate’s decision, he pays a weekly sum for the child’s maintenance.  An “illegitimate” mother may also be kept in a public institution at the public expense for six months to enable her to become attached to her child.

Such provisions are developed from the widely recognized right of the unmarried woman to claim support for her child from its father.  In France, indeed, and in the legal codes which follow the French example, it is not legally permitted to inquire into the paternity of an illegitimate child.  Such a law is, needless to say, alike unjust to the mother, to the child, and to the State.  In Austria, the law goes to the opposite, though certainly more reasonable, extreme, and permits even the mother who has had several lovers to select for herself which she chooses to make responsible for her child.  The German code adopts an intermediate course, and comes only to the aid of the unmarried mother who has one lover.  In all such cases, however, the aid given is pecuniary only; it insures the mother no recognition or respect, and (as Wahrmund has truly said in his Ehe und Eherecht) it is still necessary to insist on “the unconditional sanctity of motherhood, which is entitled, under whatever circumstances it arises, to the respect and protection of society.”

It must be added that, from the social point of view, it is not the sexual union which requires legal recognition, but the child which is the product of that union.  It would, moreover, be hopeless to attempt to legalize all sexual connection, but it is comparatively easy to legalize all children.

There has been much discussion in the past concerning the particular form which marriage ought to take.  Many theorists have exercised their ingenuity in inventing and preaching new and unusual marriage-arrangements as panaceas for social ills; while others have exerted even greater energy in denouncing all such proposals as subversive of the foundations of human society.  We may regard all such discussions, on the one side or the other, as idle.

In the first place marriage customs are far too fundamental, far too intimately blended with the primary substance of human and indeed animal society, to be in the slightest degree shaken by the theories or the practices of mere individuals, or even groups of individuals.  Monogamy—­the more or less prolonged cohabitation of two individuals of opposite sex—­has been the prevailing type of sexual relationship among the higher vertebrates and through the greater part of human history.  This is admitted even by those who believe (without any sound evidence) that man has passed through a stage of sexual promiscuity.  There have been tendencies to variation in one direction or another, but at the lowest stages and the highest stages, so far as can be seen, monogamy represents the prevailing rule.