If this be so, society itself is to blame. It not only countenances sexual relations entirely independent of the mission of the race; it frees the man from responsibility for his illegitimate children and thus assigns to him a standpoint below that of the beasts. The instincts favourable to offspring, which in animals have remained undisturbed, cannot attain their full strength until man is completely answerable for every life he creates. As soon as society decrees that the fact of two persons becoming parents makes their union obligatory, the relationship itself will gradually intensify their feeling and the man will wish to possess and preserve the elements of joy for which he must always bear the burdens. Even if man’s fatherly feelings should be slow in awaking—and if a number of fathers of the present day should thus really avail themselves of free divorce to leave wife and child—there are still the mothers, who do not, as a rule, lightly leave their children, but who, on the contrary, now suffer the deepest misfortunes and renounce the greatest happiness so as to remain with them, and who—even if they tear themselves from them—are hardly ever able to release themselves. When the law gives to every mother the rights which now only the unmarried mother possesses, but imposes at the same time on every father the obligations which now only the married have—then it may be that the child will become a new and more valuable possession in the eyes of the man. If he only feels the influence he may obtain through his wife’s respect for his fatherly qualities; if his importance in the child’s existence comes to depend on personal force, not on legal might, then the quality of fatherhood may be in a high degree ennobled. And with this affection will grow, according to the immutable law, that the more man gives, the more he loves. If matriarchy, in a new form, refined by the whole of development, should become the final phase—as in the opinion of many it has been the starting-point—of the family, then this would involve that paternal authority became conditional, depending on the value and warmth of the paternal feeling. At present many fathers are merely an accident in their children’s life, an accident which never even looks “like an idea.” And this is not only true of those fathers who, with the support of the law, withdraw themselves from all responsibility, but also of many others, especially of those who are driven by work or public business and who remain inwardly strangers to their children.