For some years we have had before our eyes one of the most deplorably humiliating examples of our view of this arithmetical incubus, the decline of the nineteenth century to make room for the twentieth. Six years are still wanting till this numerical cataclysm. Who knows how many books will be written on the century dying out, how many prophecies on the century following it; what torrents of philosophy and ink to discuss the passing of the number 19 to that of 20? Yet centuries only exist on paper, and after having made them ourselves, we adore and freely elect them to be our tyrants; only to deride the poor savages who, like us, make their own gods of wood and stone, fall on their knees before them and fear them. And we fear numbers—only another idol of thought, made for our use and necessity, and in the similitude of our wretchedness and intellectual weakness. For my part I only see around me an infinite continuity of things and of time, nor do I allow myself to be overawed by the cabal of numbers, with which we ought to amuse ourselves as with a pack of cards, esteeming them for what they are worth; a poor example of a thing yet poorer! The _dying century_, _fin de siècle_, and all such sensational phrases, which are intended to express a great deal, because they mean nothing—these exclamations, the eloquence of the non-eloquent, move me little, if at all. I look back and see _a yesterday_; I look around and see _a to-day_; forward and I see _a to-morrow_; the three tenses of the _to become_, which have no numbers, nor will ever have. For they succeed each other unceasingly, following the mighty strides of our journey, not with the figures of a century, but with a _regret_ that becomes a _hope_, and will be a _faith_; to be succeeded again and forever by _regret_, _hope_, and _faith_—unceasingly. I wished to write this in the first pages of my book to let you know that if I attempt to delineate marriage in modern society I renounce _the dying century_, the _fin de siècle_, and all such effective phrases, which would give me, based on numbers, so many resources of rhetoric and sentimentality. I have hated and always shall hate all forms of tyranny, including that of numbers. I look around and say, this is the way men marry _to-day_. They do so because they are sons of a _yesterday_, which is the father of to-day; then I look forward and hope that to-morrow will be better than yesterday or to-day, and I endeavour to promote the good as quickly as possible and with a minimum of pain, by my pen, my experience, and my studies, _cito tute et jucunde_, as Celsus has it. ⁂ In our civilized society, marriage is _the least evil_ of all the different modes of union between man and woman for the preservation of the race. It is the result of many historic evolutions, many sensual, moral, religious, and legislative elements, which have come into conflict with each other in the course of time.