yet be the most fortunate occurrence in these cases—and also the most usual. How then does it appear in reality? In most cases young people have entered into their free union because they have seen no possibility of an open marriage. They are the less able to support a child, as they themselves are supported by others, in so far as they are not keeping themselves by running into debt or by badly-paid labour. In the latter case, the child means a further hindrance to life, the more so as it must involve for the woman a diminution, perhaps a total loss, of her powers of work. It is therefore the young people’s relatives who have to help. And, when this is possible, the form it takes is that the lovers are obliged to marry and receive the help that the parents can afford. In the case of the poorer classes, this is comparatively slight, as the newly-married pair frequently stay with the parents of one of them. But in the upper classes, on the other hand, they prefer, with full reason, to form their own home, and then there ensue the inevitable cares of child and housekeeping, however simple the latter may be. But these will be a hindrance to their studies, their freedom of movement, and general development. They become cage-birds, at best fed by their parents; bound by duties during the years which should have been wholly devoted to their self-development. Thus premature marriages, whether lawful or unlawful in form, may arrest in their growth countless excellent forces, and ruin the full possibilities of happiness in later years. It is true that the early union will have stilled a powerful longing in the young people’s being. But they soon find out that it has at the same time rendered difficult, perhaps impossible, the satisfaction of their desire of knowledge, the taste for research, the creative power, and freedom of action in other, more or less important, directions; for example, in the love of travel which is felt by all young people of spirit, and in the love of pleasure in a wholesome sense. The young mother’s beauty probably never attains the fulness designed by nature, and she is destined to grow old before her time. And even when her children are not weaklings—as is most frequently the case—they do not afford her the happiness they might have brought if they had been longed for; if she had not had to sacrifice to them her youthful joy, the fulness of her strength and beauty, but, on the contrary, had felt this enhanced through motherhood. Above all, the children do not receive the bringing-up which the mother might give them at a somewhat maturer age. Even if a pair of lovers are themselves willing to be subject to the hindrances imposed in most cases by a premature union, this must be their own affair; but for the child there must be loss.