Mrs. Caird's demand for greater laxity of the marriage bond _ab initio_, the nature of the contract being left to the contracting parties, like a marriage settlement, is quite outside the sphere of practical politics, as she is herself quite aware. If men were but educated up to the Shelleyan ideal, then we might try all sorts of delightful experiments in marriage, and gradually arrive at absolute freedom of contract, which would _not_ mean that absolutely unsentimental hygienic promiscuity which is the ideal of the highly advanced physiologist. But men are not yet harmonious creatures, like Wordsworth's cloud, which "moveth altogether if it move at all." They are torn by their lusts which war in their members. Hence these bonds. Lust, lust, lust: this is the most concentrated form of selfishness--the undying worm at the root of the Tree of Life. This is the tyrant that women have at last begun to recognize as their deadly adversary and to fight against. Shelley, a better physician than Goethe, laid his finger on this plague-spot, and told the age plainly: "Thou ailest here." But he did not see that instead of saying, "Abolish marriage and prostitution will cease," he ought to have said, "Abolish prostitution and marriage will cease"--marriage without love being only a particular form of prostitution. He did not see that the abolition of marriage would no more get rid of lust than the abolition of private property would get rid of selfishness. We have already, in monogamic marriage, struggled painfully upward to the level of the higher animals; let us not imperil this progress rashly. The Cythnas of the present day have felt their burthens more directly than Shelley did. Hence their demand for economic independence, that they may not be forced into marriage or prostitution by the various degrees of starvation. Their demand is a just one, and must be satisfied somehow, even if we have to put a bonus upon womanhood and pay women, not merely fair wages for their work of all kinds, but a tribute to them as women, as potential mothers, which shall fairly handicap the sexes in the struggle for existence, and put men more on their good behaviour.