It is not my task, and it would be an impossible one, to say whether the women of the future will develop the family along individualist or socialist lines. That they will not be content with things as they are is one certainty. Another is that they ought to be made free to reform conditions in full consultation and agreement with men. Lady Aberconway has suggested that men should be obliged by law to give their wives a fixed proportion of their incomes, and there appear to be in England more followers of this idea than of the endowment of motherhood. It should certainly be possible for a wife to sue for maintenance, without being compelled to go on the rates, but the fixed payment of wives has very many and very great practical difficulties, and it would not help the millions of cases where the man’s total earnings are inadequate. Many men, even now, give not a proportion, but practically the whole of their wages to the wife to administer. A fixed proportion of one wage may be enough, and the same proportion of another too little, and a small family may easily be brought up on what would be penury for a large one. What is urgently needed is, that the problem should be dealt with by men and women not in the spirit of bargaining, or endeavouring each to best the other, but with a single endeavour to do right by one another and by the child. Nature has so arranged matters that the women cannot evade a considerable portion of the burden of parentage. Men can, and not infrequently do, evade the whole of the burden of parentage. Together all good men and women should so contrive their body politic that every child shall have the care and nurture it requires. Hitherto man’s outlook as regards marriage has been personal rather than racial. When the inequality of the marriage law with regard to infidelity is objected to, he has, for ages past, explained that he has made infidelity a more serious fault in a woman than in a man, because the result of it in a woman might be that her husband would have to support another man’s child. This is so, of course, but it is generally a far less serious injury to the race than the results of a man’s infidelity are. It seems to be a law of nature that some of the present must always be sacrificed for the future. The woman may have to sacrifice liberty, genius, life itself. Neither can the man with impunity evade his sacrifice. And he may not regard it as a gift or a favour to the woman, for which she must, in return, be subservient. It is his toll to the future, the future of his world as well as hers. CHAPTER IX THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM (3) THE HOUSEWIFE