institutional customs we may or may not consider right or wrong.  Their use imparts a flavour of essential wrong-doing and obliquity into acts and relations that may be in many cases no more than social indiscipline, which may be even conceivably a courageous act of defiance to an obsolescent limitation.  Such, until a little while ago, was a man’s cohabitation with his deceased wife’s sister.  This, which was scandalous yesterday, is now a legally honourable relationship, albeit I believe still regarded by the high Anglican as incestuous wickedness.

Now I will not deal here with the institutional changes that are involved in that general scheme of progress called Socialism.  I have discussed the relation of Socialism to Marriage and the Family quite fully in my “New Worlds for Old” ("New Worlds for Old” (A.  Constable and Co., 1908).) and to that I must refer the reader.  Therein he will see how the economic freedom and independent citizenship of women, and indeed also the welfare of the whole next generation, hang on the idea of endowing motherhood, and he will find too how much of the nature of the marriage contract is outside the scope of Socialist proposals altogether.

Apart from the broad proposals of Socialism, as a matter of personal conviction quite outside the scope of Socialism altogether, I am persuaded of the need of much greater facilities of divorce than exist at present, divorce on the score of mutual consent, of faithlessness, of simple cruelty, of insanity, habitual vice or the prolonged imprisonment of either party.  And this being so I find it impossible to condemn on any ground, except that it is “breaking ranks” and making a confusion, those who by anticipating such wide facilities as I propose have sinned by existing standards.  How far and in what manner such breaking of ranks is to be condoned I will presently discuss.  But it is clear it is an offence of a different nature from actions one believes to be in themselves and apart from the law reprehensible things.

But my scepticisms about the current legal institutions and customary code are not exhausted by these modifications I have suggested.  I believe firmly in some sort of marriage, that is to say an open declaration of the existence of sexual relations between a man and a woman, because I am averse to all unnecessary secrecies and because the existence of these peculiarly intimate relationships affects everybody about the persons concerned.  It is ridiculous to say as some do that sexual relations between two people affect no one but themselves unless a child is born.  They do, because they tend to break down barriers and set up a peculiar emotional partnership.  It is a partnership that kept secret may work as anti-socially as a secret business partnership or a secret preferential railway tariff.  And I believe too in the general social desirability of the family group, the normal group of father, mother and children, and in the extreme efficacy in the normal human being of the blood link and pride link between parent and child in securing loving care and upbringing for the child.  But this clear adhesion to Marriage and to the Family grouping about mother and father does not close the door to a large series of exceptional cases which our existing institutions and customs ignore or crush.