With regard to recent views on the marriage problem, the reader will do well to consult the thoughtful pamphlet of Gabriele Reuter, “The Problem of Marriage” (Berlin, 1907). The author points out that there is a “deep-lying dissatisfaction with the existing marriage conditions, a yearning and restless need for improvement.” In marriage, she holds, the bodily and spiritual process of human development is completed in the most concentrated manner. As a cause of the numerous unhappy marriages of our time, she points to the divergencies, so widely manifest at the present day, between modes of thought and views of life among members of the same strata of society and among those of the same degree of education, more especially in religious matters, and she refers also to experiments made in respect of new modes of life, such as the woman’s movement. According to Gabriele Reuter, the child will become the regulator of all the changes in the married state which we have to expect in the future. As “marriage,” she defines that earnest union between man and woman which is formed for the purpose of a life in common, and with the intention of procreating and bringing up children, and she regards it as altogether beside the question whether that union has been affected with or without civil or ecclesiastical sanction. In contrast with this idea of “marriage,” there would be other fugitive or more enduring unions, serving only for excitement and sensual enjoyment. It is interesting to note that the author recommends to the modern woman “good-humoured and motherly forbearance” in respect of marital infidelity. For a woman’s own good and for that of her children, it is more important that her husband should show her love, respect, and friendship, than that he should preserve unconditional physical faithfulness. But the author here ignores the possibility of venereal infection as a result of occasional unfaithfulness, which very seriously threatens the well-being of the wife and the children! Very wisely she advises a facilitation of divorce. This would not make husband and wife careless in their relations one to the other; on the contrary, it would make both more careful and thoughtful in the avoidance of anything causing pain to one another. The children should always remain with the mother up to the age of fourteen years. A detailed and valuable account of the problems of modern marriage will be found also in the work “Regarding Married Happiness: the Experiences, Reflections, and Advice of a Physician” (Wiesbaden, 1906). Fortunately, by the legal introduction of =civil marriage= and of =divorce= the necessity has now been recognized by the State of leaving open for many persons a middle course--one which lies =between= lifelong marriage (whose sacramental character is thus abandoned) and free extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, =and yet maintains the tendency towards the ideal of monogamic marriage=.