Ring out the old, ring in the new; * * * * * Ring out the false, ring in the true; Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old; Ring in the thousand years of peace. [1] Since these words were written the _Daily Chronicle_ of 10th September, 1898, quotes them as having been used by a distinguished living English general. XI. THE ETHICS OF MARRIAGE. There is probably no department of morality in which a metaphysic of ethic is more conspicuously needed than in that which concerns marriage. The insurrection of woman against the disabilities to which her sex was in the past unjustly subjected, due perhaps more to custom and tradition than to the statute law of the land, has developed in more recent times into a serious attack on the central institution of civilised life, on that fundamental fact of Nature on which posterity and society repose. We have had an outbreak in literature culminating in the giddy glory of the "hill-top novel," with its heroine "who did," and in America what is tautologically described as the "Free-Love Society" was founded to propagate the truth of what Rousseau euphemistically describes as _mariage apres la nature_. For all that, however, one seems to hear less of the "hill-top" species, and possibly--with the problem play, without which no theatre was complete a couple of years ago--it may be fading into the mist of the past. It is with communities, we may take it, as with individuals. There are moments when, as it has been said, "every one is an atheist, from archbishops downwards," when a sense of the purposelessness and futility of perpetual combat seizes the most ardent. These are the dark hours when attacks are planned and delivered against the most sacred institutions, when people are not at their best, but are restless, rebellious and impatient of restraint; for nations like individuals can go mad. Then it is that the wide-awake novelist and playwright see their opportunity, and the temporary success of the sex-play or the breezy romance is the reflection of the thoughts--none of the best--that are for the moment flitting through men's feverish minds. But we soon return to saner moments; our moral sense resumes its normal sway, and sex-plays and romances fade away into oblivion.