Quite apart, however, from the possibility of particular children appealing more to one parent than the other, and the cleavage which such factions confirm or start in the home, children and their multifarious wants are, in themselves, an inexhaustible source of contention. Their particular foibles, their wilfulness, their education, are matters which, while they are constantly to the fore among the problems of the home, as constantly give rise to friction, or, to say the least, to differences of opinion between their parents. When once, therefore, one of the parents—the father—has naturally and inevitably suffered so marked a degradation in rank that his word, his opinion, his judgment, is no longer attended to with the respect and eagerness which he encountered in his wife in their early childless days, it is not surprising that discussions or arguments, from being merely amicable exchanges of opinion, should degenerate into acrimonious and heated quarrels—the husband resenting every minute more and more the cavalier manner in which his views are rejected as worthless by the “spouse of his heart,” the wife resenting every moment more and more the presumption with which the mere _means to an end_, this _sparking-plug_ and _breadwinner_, is daring to assume supreme authority over _her_ brood, _her_ babes, the fruit of _her_ womb. Now, in view of all this, can it any longer be maintained that this element in the home—the children—actually contributes to the affection between the parents? In the happiest cases the ardent love of the father for one child, and the ardent love of the mother for another, may attach each parent individually to the common hearth; but to argue as the two judges, above quoted, argued before the Divorce Commission of 1912,[75] that this proves that children “strengthen the union,” or “keep it together,” without explaining more narrowly how they effect this end, is to deliver the whole question over into the hands of the romanticists and sentimentalists, who will not scruple to arrive at the foolish conclusion that children perforce increase the affection existing between parents. I have stated the extreme case in order to make the nature of the cleavage, in so far as it arises from the presence of the children, as plain as possible. In all families it does not become acute, because there is too much at stake; and much is therefore suffered in silence, swallowed down or repressed, for the sake of the home. The only point it is necessary to make clear is, that when it is also argued here that the presence of children in the home does contribute to a very great extent to the stability of that home, something very different is meant from what sentimentalists and other muddlers are likely to infer. I most emphatically do not mean that the presence of the children increases the mutual love of the parents—nay, I would go farther and say that it leads to exactly the opposite result.