complication were removed, as it could be, we should probably find that the adjustment of marriage to shifting ideals and conditions would come about in a natural and advantageous manner, as adjustments usually do when vexing and hampering conditions are removed. The question will settle itself in any case. Just how, no one, of course, can tell; but however revolutionary the adaptation to new conditions may be, it will not _seem_ revolutionary to the people of the future because “the minds of men will be fitted to it.” This is an all-important fact, and one that is too little respected; for the desire to enforce our own moral and spiritual criteria upon posterity is quite as strong as the desire to enforce them upon contemporaries. It is a desire which finds a large measure of fulfilment--where is the society which does not struggle along under a dead weight of tradition and law inherited from its grandfathers? All political and religious systems have their root and their strength in the innate conservatism of the human mind, and its intense fear of autonomy. Because of this conservatism, people never move towards revolution; they are pushed towards it by intolerable injustices in the economic and social order under which they live. There were, and are, such injustices in the laws and customs of the Christian world governing marriage and the relations of the sexes; hence the changes which have already begun, and may conceivably proceed until they shall prove as far-reaching as those by which marriage in the past was transformed from an instinctive habit into an institution subject to regulation by everyone except the two people most intimately concerned. FOOTNOTES: [10] Westermarck defines it as “a more or less durable connexion between male and female lasting beyond the mere act of propagation till after the birth of the offspring.” [11] E. C. Parsons: “The Family.” [12] It is interesting in this connexion to note that in post-war England, where the thousands of unemployed workers constitute a heavy drain on the public purse and a baffling political problem, it has been made lawful to sell devices for birth-control. One now sees these devices conspicuously displayed in druggists’ windows. [13] In Maryland fornication is not a crime, although it may entitle a husband to divorce if he did not know of it at the time of the marriage. Adultery is punishable by a fine of ten dollars.