The modern mother has begun to consider herself as a human being as well as a mother; she no longer thinks that "A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive." She is coming to look upon herself as a sort of æsthetic school inspector. She lives round her children rather than in them; she is less animal. Above all, she is more critical. Having more opportunity of mixing with people, she ceases to see her child as marvelous because it is her child. She is losing something of her conceit and has learned to say, "_the_ baby" instead of "_my_ baby." It is a revolutionary atmosphere, and the developing child has something to push against when it wants to earn its parents' approval, for modern parents are fair judges of excellence; they are educated. The old-time father was nonplussed by his son, and could not help him in his _delectus_, but the modern father is not so puzzled when his son wishes to converse of railway finance. The parent, more capable of comradeship, has come to want to be a comrade. He is no longer addressed as "sir"; he is often addressed as "old chap." That is fine, but it is in dead opposition to the close, hard family idea. Likewise, man and wife have come to look upon each other rather differently; not differently enough, but then humanity never does anything enough; when it comes near to anything drastic it grows afraid. Man still thinks that "whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing", but he is no longer finding the one he sought not so long ago. She is no longer his property, and it would not occur to the roughest among us to offer a wife for sale for five shillings in Smithfield market, as was done now and then as late as the early nineteenth century. Woman is no longer property; she has been freed; in England she has even been allowed, by the Married Women's Property Act, to hold that which was her own. The Married Women's Property Act has modified the attitude of the mother to her child and to her husband. She is less linked when she has property, for she can go. If every woman had means, or a trade of her own, we should have achieved something like free alliance; woman would be in the position of the woman in "Pygmalion", whom her man could not beat because, she not being married to him, if he beat her she might leave him--in its way a very strong argument against marriage.