(_h_) The creation of a community on the smallest scale, in which the children may, by constant association with their parents, acquire their stock of general and specialized knowledge, learn the business by which they may ultimately earn their living, and cultivate efficiency in it quietly and gradually from infancy upwards. (This is an advantage which, except in rare cases, has hardly survived in family life in England.) Now, attractive as these advantages may appear to the legislator, or legislators of a people, and cogent as they may make the argument for monogamic marriage, it will be seen, that they contain little that will necessarily secure the conjugal “happiness” of the two young people whose actions and movements they are designed to limit and to constrain. They consist chiefly of duties which, while not necessarily unpleasant, give rise to no small amount of anxiety and misgiving, and certainly lend a graver accent to matrimony than is usually imparted to it by that promise of light-hearted enjoyment upon which most stress is laid by the traditional literature, poetry and public sentiment of all Anglo-Saxon people. On the other hand, it would be idle to deny that if the aspects of monogamous marriage that they represent were more frequently emphasized and brought to the attention of both young and old, the number of “happy” marriages might certainly be very much increased. For as I have shown, it is the hedonistic view of marriage, or that picture of it that dwells immoderately upon its supposed unfailing gift of happiness, that has done most in modern civilised societies to undermine its value as a working and workable institution. Its plain utility is smothered under too much sentiment and false doctrine. This result has been brought about largely by Christianity, which has persistently endeavoured to teach the high-falutin’ nonsense of matrimony as principally “a union of souls”[52]; but added to Christian influence in Anglo-Saxon countries, at least, there has also been the detrimental overlay of romantic obsessions,[53] which has made a realistic view of primitive and natural needs almost impossible.