So long as responsibility for the care and support of children continues to be vested in the parents, so long, for the sake of the child, will it be the duty of society to insist that parents shall not neglect this responsibility. But when society had renounced all claim to regulate the affairs of married people, it would content itself with holding all parents, married or unmarried, jointly liable for the support and care of their children. If the parents were married, then the apportioning of this burden between them would be arranged by mutual agreement, and the community’s only interest in the contract would be that of arbiter in case of a dispute between the parties, precisely as in case of other contracts. To assume that the community’s interest in children justifies its claim to “preserve the home” by making marriage indissoluble or dissoluble only under humiliating conditions, is to confuse issues. The practice of perpetuating marriage merely for the sake of children defeats its own end; for it is, far from being good for children, likely to be injurious to them. It condemns them to be brought up in what Mr. Shaw has well called a little private hell. For the home, as other critics than Mr. Shaw have pointed out, is a proper place for children only when it provides harmonious conditions for their development; and harmony is not characteristic of homes where mutual love and confidence no longer exist between the parents. The demand that the freedom and happiness of parents shall be sacrificed to the so-called interest of the child is in reality a demand that injustice shall be done one person for the sake of another; and where this demand is effective it serves no end but that of frustration and discord, as might be expected. It is far better, as modern society is coming to realize, for the community to content itself with insisting upon the discharge of parental responsibility, without prescribing too minutely the conditions under which it shall be done.