What will marriage and the family become in the future? For one who is not a prophet by supernatural inspiration, it is hazardous to make predictions. The future, nevertheless, is born from the womb of the past, and, after having patiently scrutinised the evolution of bygone ages, we may legitimately risk a few inductions with regard to the ages to come. Doubtless the primitive forms of marriage and the family will persist, if not for ever, as Herbert Spencer believes, at least for a very long time among certain inferior races, protected and at the same time oppressed by climates which the civilised man cannot brave with impunity. These backward prehistoric races will continue to subsist in unwholesome regions, as witnesses of a distant past, recalling to more developed races their humble origin. But with these last the form of marriage and of the family, which has incessantly been evolving, cannot evidently remain immutable in the future. The little human world knows no more repose than the cosmic environment from whence it has sprung, and which encloses it. Among peoples, as among individuals, vital concurrence and selection do their work. Now, when it is a matter of institutions so essentially vital as marriage and the family, the least amelioration is of the highest importance; it has an influence on the number and quality of fresh generations, and on the flesh and spirit of peoples. All things being equal, the preponderance, whether pacific or not, will always fall to the nations which produce the greatest number of the most robust, most intelligent, and best citizens. These better endowed nations will often absorb or replace the others, and always in the long run will be docilely imitated by them. Ethnography and history show us the true sense of evolution in the past. Societies have constantly advanced from confusion to distinction. Monogamic marriage has succeeded to various more confused modes of sexual association. So also the family is the ultimate residuum of vast communities of ill-defined relationships. In its turn, the family itself has become restricted. At first it was still a sort of little clan; and then it was reduced to be essentially no more than the very modest group formed by the father, the mother, and the children. At the same time the familial patrimony crumbled, just as that of the clan had been previously parcelled out; it became individual. What is reserved for us in the future? Will the family be reconstituted by a slow movement of retrogression, as Herbert Spencer believes?[1123] Nothing is less probable.