It appears that the great liberty in the matter of divorce thus suddenly bestowed was, like all suddenly acquired liberty, abused at first. Both men and women, without bestowing much thought on their children, recklessly gave way to ephemeral passions which had neither the justification nor the dignity of true love. Corresponding phenomena are to be found throughout all history, wherever fetters have been broken. But for those who, like Bonald, had no faith in liberty and believed in no disciplining power except that of restraint, what occurred sufficiently proved the necessity of returning to the old order of things. The ideal marriage (an ideal which will never be lost sight of and which is sometimes realised) is, of course, that in which the two united human beings love each other till death, nay, with a love that lasts beyond death. But this ideal marriage is the result of a rare, fortunate choice, not of compulsory laws. For such laws the children formed the natural pretext. Bonald propounds his doctrine of the rights of the child in the following effective, admirably expressed proposition: "As the contract of marriage concerns three persons, the father, the mother, and the child, it cannot be annulled because two agree in desiring that it should be. Since the child is under age, society defends its cause against its parents, and as the child's advocate protests against the dissolubility of marriage." This argument premises, in the first place, that the continuance of the marriage at all costs is what is undoubtedly best for the child, a premise which is distinctly open to doubt. In the second place, it presupposes the welfare of the child to be the one vital and all-important matter, a presupposition which only adherents of the principle of authority can be expected to accept without proof. And lastly, it takes account only of the children born in wedlock, regarding the others as non-existent, though it is well known that one of the saddest results of the traditional order of things is that not all children are born with equal claims upon their parents, nor, consequently, upon society. Bonald's social order, in which the welfare of the child is declared to be of supreme importance, has in our day led to more than 2,800,000 French men and women being born as illegitimate children, in an undeserved inferiority to their parents which is more strongly insisted on in France than in other countries.