Perhaps the most serious objection to the union by law is that it is so often an effective barrier against the union by affection; for the union by law complicates marriage with a great many uses that are not properly germane to it; such as the custom of taking on one another’s family and friends, and the setting up of a common menage where this most intimate and delicate of relationships is maintained in a trying semi-publicity under the critical and unwavering scrutiny of relatives and friends. The influence of the expected extends to the regulation of the menage and the division of labour. A lover would hardly, perhaps, require his mistress to darn his socks; but if she became his wife he would probably yield to the immemorial expectation that a married woman shall do her husband’s mending. So, likewise, a woman may refuse to accept support from her lover so long as he is only her lover, and accept it as a matter of course when the union has been legalized. All conventional uses have a purely fortuitous and incidental connexion with marriage; yet they often fret it into failure. As Jane Littell remarked not long ago in the _Atlantic Monthly_, “being friends with someone to whom the law binds one is not so easy as it sounds.” This is especially true where the law assumes a natural inferiority in one party to the contract, as it almost universally does. I have not forgotten the children. One could hardly do so in an age when sentimentalism offers them as the final and unanswerable reason for continuing to tolerate the injustice involved in institutionalized marriage. But the very fact that it is the sentimentalist who thus defends established abuses is in itself enough to warrant considerable wariness in dealing with his arguments; for when the defenders of any cause have recourse to sentimentality, it is likely to be for want of solid ground under their feet, or in order to obscure a doubtful ulterior motive. Sentimentalism is a sugar coating on the pill of things as they are, which makes it easier for many people to swallow it than to contemplate a dose which is at once more salutary and more formidable, namely: things as they ought to be. When one hears the sentimentalist proclaiming the sacredness of marriage, one may agree with him; but at the same time one must wonder what kind of marriage he means; whether it is the ceremony performed by a minister or a magistrate, or the union which two people have made sacred through mutual respect, confidence and love. Such marriages as this last have sometimes been without benefit of clergy--Would these be as sacred to the sentimentalist as the marriage which has been sanctified only in law? Again, when one listens to the good old saws about the glory of motherhood, one may be interested to know the conditions under which it is proposed to call it glorious; and when domesticity is held up to admiration as woman’s natural vocation, one wonders whether the