I propose, however, to make a critical study of the family. Indeed, I venture to say at once that our ideal of the family is so encrusted with ancient superstitions that it pressingly invites the critical attention of our age: that the family is the foundation of the State only in an historical sense, not in the sense that a State cannot be based on any other procreative arrangement: and that the cloak of superstition and rhetoric that we have put about it has covered for ages, and still covers, an appalling amount of vice, hypocrisy, and misery. My point of view has been stated. The affairs of this planet must be run by men for men. The supreme aim must be to lighten the burden of suffering which we inherit from a less intelligent and less humane past. Any creed, code, or institution which forbids progress on these lines must be assailed. The first and most damnable superstition in regard to the family is the claim that marriage ought to be indissoluble. In its strict form this belief is held only by Roman Catholics, and by a section of the Church of England which was only partially reformed in the sixteenth century and has a strange ambition to disavow even that limited reform. But the most insidious mischief of this old ideal is that it has embedded deep in our minds the feeling that, although indissoluble marriage is an intolerable yoke, we must be very chary and niggardly in granting relief. This feeling we ascribe to a wise concern for our social welfare, whereas it is due to the subconscious tyranny of the old superstition. Recently we have seen the strange spectacle of a non-Christian moralist standing amongst our bishops to bar the way of reform: seeking to prolong, in the name of humanity, a superstition that darkens the homes of a large part of humanity. The bishops may have smiled. A distinguished sociological writer, Mr. L. Hobhouse, in classifying forms of marriage, says, with unconscious humour: "Marriage is indissoluble among the Andamanese, some Papuans of New Guinea, at Watubela, at Lampong in Sumatra, among the Igorrotes and Italones of the Philippines, the Veddahs of Ceylon, and in the Romish Church." One trusts that the Roman (and Anglican) Catholics like the company they keep; the peoples enumerated by Mr. Hobhouse are the very lowest and least intelligent savages known to science. The Church of Rome has long boasted that its ideal of indissoluble union is the final and culminating point of human wisdom in regard to the family. It now appears that indissoluble marriage was the most primitive human tradition, and was discarded by the Roman and all other civilisations when they passed from childhood to manhood.