Personally, I am not prepared to admit that children are made miserable or destroyed by divorce and change. But granting that, certainly man is not to blame, for from the very beginning he has been crucified upon a rood which is not of his devising. He did not institute marriage; it was instituted for him, the biologic process having devised it long before he appeared apparently. I would gladly have all living creatures endowed with every capacity which would fit them for a peaceful and contented enjoyment of a moralistic life, if that were intended or important, but since in the vast and secret laboratory of Nature alone can man be properly outfitted for the adventure, and since, obviously, in many cases he is not, I submit that the matter of matrimony and the welfare of the ensuing children cannot be solved by talk and that Nature and its concomitants, change and divorce, must be permitted to take their free and unlimited way as they will. The great tides and forces of life which burst upon men and animals and change them do not always give notice that they are about to rise and change things. They rise in their great strength, and man, to his bewilderment, finds himself changing and changed. Hence I would say that the trouble with marriage is that in its extreme interpretation it conflicts with the law of change, or balance and equation, and hence suffers a severe and seemingly destructive defeat. II _What would be the result were we generally to adopt Ellen Key’s conception of marriage: “Marriage is only moral when it grows from an inner necessity, and not from outward pressure?”_ Very pleasant, I should say, if logic and ideal syllogism ruled in life. The trouble with this world is that no ideal, however eagerly pursued, is guaranteed a happy fruition. You may lay down your formula for happiness and say: “Thus and so being done all will be well,” but can you make human nature do anything according to any one finite individual theory? Man does not make or regulate Nature: Nature makes and regulates man, and She makes him any way She pleases--vile, lovely, strong, weak, simple, complex, and so on. There is no one theory that fits all climates or types of people. Life would be very dull if this were true.