Our right attitude toward married women's labour must depend upon a right understanding of the social meaning of marriage. This was a question which had to be dealt with at length in a previous volume and I can only state here in a word, what was the conclusion come to. It was that marriage is a device for supporting and buttressing motherhood by fatherhood. Its mark is that it provides for _common parental care of offspring_. A more prosaic way of stating the case would be that marriage is a device for making the father responsible. If we go far back in the history of the animal world, we find mating but not marriage. The father's function is purely physiological, transient and wholly irresponsible. The whole burden of caring for offspring, when first there comes to be need for that care, in the history of organic progress, falls upon the mother. But even amongst the fishes we find that sometimes, as in the case of the stickleback, the father helps the mother to build a sort of nest, and does "sentry-go" outside it to keep off marauders. In this common care of the young we see what is in all essentials marriage, though some may prefer to dignify the word by confining it to those human associations which have been blessed by Church and State, even though the father throws the baby at the mother, or sends her into the streets to earn her bread and his beer. If some of our modern reformers knew any biology, or even happened to visit a music-hall where the biograph was showing scenes of bird-life, they would learn that the human arrangement whereby the father goes out and forages for mother and children has roots in hoary antiquity. The pity is that there is no one to point the moral to the crowd when the father-bird is seen returning with delicacies for the mother, who tends her nest and its occupants. The reader will already have anticipated the conclusion, to which, as I see it, the study of the fundamental laws of life must lead the sociologist in this case. It is that the duty of the father is to support the mother and children, and that the duty of the State is to see that he does this. Thus, if asked whether I believe in the endowment of motherhood, I reply, yes, indeed, I believe in the endowment of motherhood by the corresponding fatherhood. If our first principles are sound, we must believe that the mother must be endowed or provided for; there can be no difference of opinion so far. Often, as we have seen, there is no corresponding fatherhood, for the mother may be a widow, or unmarried and unable to find the father. But where the corresponding fatherhood exists, we fly directly in the face of Nature, we deny the consistent teaching of evolution as the study of sub-human life reveals it to us, if we do not turn to the father and say, this is your act, for which you are responsible.