“Thus it happens that even an exceptional nature is strained by the burden it has to bear, and the children are not then witnesses of their parents living together, but of their dying together. “Neither religion nor law, neither society nor a family, can determine what it is that marriage is killing in a man, or what he finds it possible to rescue in that state--=he himself alone= knows the one and suspects the other. He alone can delineate the boundaries, can decide whether he is satisfied to regard his own existence as closed, and to remain contented in the life of his children; whether he is able so to endure the sorrows of a continued married life with such fortitude as to make it increase his own powers and those of his children.” The conviction of the rights of love, and the consciousness of the rights of the children, are to-day unmistakably on the increase. There is no danger that the latter right, the right of the children, will suffer in comparison with the rights of love. It is, on the contrary, characteristic, that out of the very same feeling by which the freer configuration of the amatory life is demanded, there has also arisen a =new programme of the rights of children=. This same Ellen Key who proclaims the inalienable rights of free love, speaks also of the “=century of the child=,” and devotes to this subject an admirable book. The most important point with regard to free divorce, in respect to the children, is that the father and the mother must not separate from one another in hatred, but in friendship, and that, in the interest of the children, they should continue to meet one another from time to time. Ellen Key here rightly condemns the conduct of the good friends and relatives who simply lay down the law that the separated pair must hate one another, and must in every relationship torment and cheat one another. It is precisely such “enmity” of the parents after divorce that is so full of bad consequences in respect of the children. We also have to consider this point of view, that sometimes the new husband or the new wife has a better influence over the children than their own parents, and that in this way divorce may have brought the children greater happiness, may have been for them a true blessing. The closing chapter of her work is devoted by Ellen Key to the formulation of practical recommendations regarding the new marriage laws. She indicates as a starting-point of her dissertation that the ideal form of marriage is the perfectly free union between a man and a woman. But this ideal can in the meanwhile only be attained through =transitional forms=. In this the opinion of society regarding the morality of the sexual relationship must find expression, and thus remain as the support for undeveloped personalities; but at the same time, these transitional forms must be sufficiently free to favour a progressive development of the higher erotic consciousness of the present day.