and trusts and responsibilities of life can be built—­duty.  When this rock has been faithfully clung to, when in the midst of disillusionment and shattered ideals the noble resolution has been clung to never to base personal happiness on a broken trust or another’s pain, I have over and over again known the, most imperfect marriage prove in the end to be happy and contented.  Here again I quote some words of Mrs. Humphry Ward, which she puts into the mouth of her hero:  “No,” he said with deep emphasis—­“No; I have come to think the most disappointing and hopeless marriage, nobly borne, to be better worth having than what people call an ’ideal passion’—­if the ideal passion must be enjoyed at the expense of one of those fundamental rules which poor human nature has worked out, with such infinite difficulty and pain, for the protection and help of its own weakness,"[36] I am aware that neither Mr. Grant Allen with his “hill-top” novels, nor Mrs. Mona Caird need be taken too seriously, but when the latter says, “There is something pathetically absurd in this sacrifice to their children of generation after generation of grown people,"[37] I would suggest that it would be still more pathetically absurd to see the whole upward-striving past, the whole noble future of the human race, sacrificed to their unruly wills and affections, their passions and desires.  If as Goldwin Smith says in his rough, incisive way, “There is not much union of heart in marriage, I do not see that there would be any more union of heart in adultery.”

I have dwelt thus earnestly upon this point because the sooner we realize for ourselves and our girls that any relaxation of the marriage bond will in its disastrous consequences fall upon us, and not upon men, the better.  It is the woman who first grows old and loses her personal attractions, while a man often preserves his beauty into extreme old age.  It is the burdened mother of a family who cannot compete in companionship with the highly cultured young unmarried lady, with the leisure to post herself up in the last interesting book or the newest political movement.  It is the man who is the more variable in his affections than the woman; more constant as she is by nature, as well as firmly anchored down by the strength of her maternal love.  It is therefore on the woman that any loosening of the permanence of the marriage tie will chiefly fall in untold suffering.  “Le mariage c’est la justice,” say the French, who have had experience enough of “les unions libres”—­justice to the wife and mother, securing her the stability of her right to her husband’s affections, the stability to her right of maintenance after she has given up her means of support, above all, the stability of her right to the care of her own children.  If we want to study the innate misery to women arising from the relaxation of the married tie, or transient unions, we had better read Professor Dowden’s Life of Shelley—­misery not the result of public stigma, for there was no