Only one thing is certain: that no one is more outside the question than the very one who causes the suffering. Thus nothing can be more unreasonable than to leave to the judgment of one of the parties the decision we have just mentioned. The knowledge of being able to refuse a divorce now involves want of consideration for the other’s moods of dejection, which would never occur if consideration were necessary to prevent separation. Such attentions are especially significant at the beginning of married life, when most young married people solve the small and great problems of accommodation with more or less difficulty. The birth of the first child, moreover, is often accompanied by abnormal states of feeling, which lead to hasty conclusions as to incompatibility and antipathy. The opponents of free divorce think that it is just during these years that precipitate divorces might take place. But they do not reflect that either partner in his sense of proprietorship now gives himself a loose rein in a way that would be unthinkable if such security did not exist. Thus the young certainly keep together, but not unfrequently destroy their finest chances of happiness. The need of mutual caution during these dissensions should have a much deeper influence in keeping a couple together than has at present the knowledge that they cannot be free. After the advent of children, the danger is small—except in the case of heartless natures—that a sufferer will too hastily think his powers of endurance are exhausted. The inter-dependence which children create between their parents when these together care for and love them, is sometimes indissoluble. In most cases it is so strong as to form the real tie, without which laws twice as strict as the present ones would have no power to keep together two unwilling beings. When speaking of love’s selection, we pointed to the signs which indicate that the feeling for the race—the feeling which from time immemorial has linked together man and woman at a common hearth, has raised the altar near it and round them both the town wall—is approaching its renaissance. Consciousness of the children’s rights is indubitably on the increase, together with a knowledge of the rights of love. And against the assaults of this most turbulent and dangerous sea the race-feeling will continue to stand as a wall protecting society, though in a new form to give it new powers of resistance. But the opponents of divorce think, on the contrary, that the sense of happiness through the children—especially in the case of the father—has now become so weak that most fathers would free themselves from all responsibility if they only could.