If she has a child it has, as a rule, been born first; such is our morality that motherhood often drives her on to the streets! Any woman who marries for money or position is departing from the biological and moral ends of marriage. A child can be born gladly only as the fruit of love. It is in this direction, rather than in maintaining a barren virginity, that woman's chastity should be guarded. We may excuse women on the grounds of possible ignorance, but, none the less, have the conditions of marriage been unfavourable to the development of a fine moral feeling in women or in men. No one can have failed to feel surprised at the men many girls are content to marry; it is one thing that must be set against the claim women make as the morally superior sex. Mr. Wells, whom I have already quoted in this matter, places in the mouth of one of his characters, in his recent book, _Marriage_, a true and terrible indictment of women. "If there was one thing in which you might think woman would show a sense of some divine purpose in life it is in the matter of children, and they show about as much care in the matter--oh, as rabbits! Yes, rabbits. I stick to it. Look at the things a nice girl will marry; look at the men's children she'll submit to bring into the world. Cheerfully! Proudly! For the sake of the home and the clothes!" The fact is our marriage in its present legal form is primarily an arrangement for securing the rights of property. This in itself is not necessarily evil. Economic necessities cannot be ignored in any form of the sexual relationship; it is rather a readjustment that is called for here. We have seen how admirably a marriage system based upon property in the form of free contracts worked in Egypt, and how happy were the family relationships under this system of equal partnership between the wife and husband. I would again recommend the careful study of these marriage contracts to all those interested in marriage reform. The contracts were never fixed in one form; all that was required being that the interests of the woman and the children were in all cases protected. Take again the Roman marriage which, in its latest fine developments, has special interest, as the history of modern marriage systems may be traced back to it. The Romans came, like the Egyptians, to regard marriage as a contract rather than a legal form. In the custom of _usus_, which supplanted the earlier and sacred _confarreatio_, there was no ceremony at all. I would recall to the memory of my readers the significant fact that in both these great countries this freedom in marriage was associated with the freedom of woman. It must be recognised that these two forces act together.