Thus, for any radical improvement in the system of matrimonial connections, we must look to a corresponding improvement in the spirit of the age, and the first step in advance will have been taken when marriage ceases to be the only legal contract which is enforced notwithstanding the ignorance of a contracting party as to the engagement entered into. The frequency of divorce petitions will be greatly diminished from the time we get rid of the idiotic and almost incredibly wicked convention by which we take every possible precaution we can think of to ensure that a girl, when she marries, shall have no possible means of knowing to what she is committing herself. No more ingenious contrivance for obtaining marital infelicity could be imagined. The next step will have been taken when it is recognised as disgraceful for parents to put pressure upon the inclinations of their children of either sex to induce them to marry, and when social execration renders such pressure impossible. Concurrently with this, or as a result of it, a third step will be some abatement of our present entire neglect of any demand for good character in a bridegroom who would be outraged if he thought that the least aspersion could be suggested concerning his bride. In other words, the greatest improvements in the status of the world with regard to matrimony will be effected when we recognise the claim of woman to be made the equal of man in knowledge, in discretion and in social rights. No legislative reform as yet ever suggested could have anything like as much effect in removing the evils under which we groan, in respect to matrimony, as this natural and inevitable development. Naturally the improvement in the position of women in the new age will not arrive at a bound, nor will their rights in relation to marriage be unaccompanied by other rights at present withheld, and perhaps not always unreasonably withheld. On the contrary, the recognition of one set of rights will facilitate and accelerate the recognition of the other. It is generally agreed that the tendency of the sexes is to become less divergent, intellectually and morally, for reasons connected with what Spencer calls "the less early arrest of individual evolution, and the result everywhere seen throughout the organic world, of a self-preserving power inversely proportionate to the race-preserving power." [33]