it was not written of civilisation, or of white men, but of the Bantu tribes of East Africa,[14] complete Negroes who, while far from being among the lowest savages, belong to a culture which is only just emerging from cannibalism, witchcraft, and customary bloodshed.  So close a resemblance between the European husband and the Negro husband significantly suggests how remarkable has been the arrest of development in the husband’s customary status during a vast period of the world’s history.

[14] Hon. C. Dundas, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, Vol. 45, 1915, p. 302.

It is in the considerable group of couples where the husband’s work separates him but little from the home that the pressure on the wife is most severe, and without the relief and variety secured by his frequent absence.  She has perhaps led a life of her own before marriage, she knows how to be economically independent; now they occupy a small dwelling, they have, maybe, one or two small children, they can only afford one helper in the work or none at all, and in this busy little hive the husband and wife are constantly tumbling over each other.  It is small wonder if the wife feels a deep discontent beneath her willing ministrations and misses the devotion of the lover in the perpetual claims of the husband.

But the difficulty is not settled if she persuades him to take a room outside.  He is devoted to his wife and his home, with good reason, for the wife makes the home and he is incapable of making a home.  His new domestic arrangements sink into careless and sordid disorder, and he is conscious of profound discomfort.  His wife soon realises that it is a choice between his return to the home and complete separation.  Most wives never get even as far as this attempt at solution of the difficulty and hide their secret discontent.

This is the situation which to-day is becoming intensified and extended on a vast scale.  The habit and the taste for freedom, adventure, and economic independence is becoming generated among millions of women who once meekly trod the ancient beaten paths, and we must not be so foolish as to suppose that they can suddenly renounce those habits and tastes at the threshold of marriage.  Moreover, it is becoming clear to men and to women alike, and for the first time, that the world can be remoulded, and that the claims for better conditions of work, for a higher standard of life, and for the attainment of leisure, which previously had only feebly been put forward, may now be asserted drastically.  We see therefore to-day a great revolutionary movement, mainly on the part of men in the world of Labour, and we see a corresponding movement, however less ostentatious, mainly on the part of women, in the world of the Home.