We live in a constantly changing development and modification of that tradition.  It is well to bring that factor of constant change into mind at the outset of this discussion and to keep it there.  To forget it, and it is commonly forgotten, is to falsify every issue.  Marriage and the Family are perennially fluctuating institutions, and probably scarcely anything in modern life is changing so much; they are in their legal constitution or their moral and emotional quality profoundly different things from what they were a hundred years ago.  A woman who marries nowadays marries, if one may put it quantitatively, far less than she did even half a century ago; the married woman’s property act, for example, has revolutionized the economic relationship; her husband has lost his right to assault her and he cannot even compel her to cohabit with him if she refuses to do so.  Legal separations and divorces have come to modify the quality and logical consequences of the bond.  The rights of parent over the child have been even more completely qualified.  The State has come in as protector and educator of the children, taking over personal powers and responsibilities that have been essential to the family institution ever since the dawn of history.  It inserts itself more and more between child and parent.  It invades what were once the most sacred intimacies, and the Salvation Army is now promoting legislation to invade those overcrowded homes in which children (it is estimated to the number of thirty or forty thousand) are living as I write, daily witnesses of their mother’s prostitution or in constant danger of incestuous attack from drunken fathers and brothers.  And finally as another indication of profound differences, births were almost universally accidental a hundred years ago; they are now in an increasing number of families controlled and deliberate acts of will.  In every one of their relations do Marriage and the Family change and continue to change.

But the inherent defectiveness of the human mind which my metaphysical book sets itself to analyze, does lead it constantly to speak of Marriage and the Family as things as fixed and unalterable as, let us say, the characteristics of oxygen.  One is asked, Do you believe in Marriage and the Family? as if it was a case of either having or not having some definite thing.  Socialists are accused of being “against the Family,” as if it were not the case that Socialists, Individualists, high Anglicans and Roman Catholics are all against Marriage and the Family as these institutions exist at the present time.  But once we have realized the absurdity of this absolute treatment, then it should become clear that with it goes most of the fabric of right and wrong, and nearly all those arbitrary standards by which we classify people into moral and immoral.  Those last words are used when as a matter of fact we mean either conforming or failing to conform to changing laws and developing