And now, further, when our still developing social needs call for an ever-increasing delicacy and freedom in the interservice and common service of individuals, we find that even what economic unity remains to the family is being rapidly eliminated. As the economic relation becomes rudimentary and disappears, the sex-relation asserts itself more purely; and the demand in the world to-day for a higher and nobler sex-union is as sharply defined as the growing objection to the existing economic union. Strange as it may seem to us, so long accustomed to confound the two it is precisely the outgrown relics of a previously valuable family relation which so painfully retard the higher development of the monogamic marriage relation. Each generation of young men and women comes to the formation of sex-union with higher and higher demands for a true marriage, with ever-growing needs for companionship. Each generation of men and women need and ask more of each other. A woman is no longer content and grateful to have “a kind husband”: a man is no longer content with a patient Griselda; and, as all men and women, in marrying, revert to the economic status of the earlier family, they come under conditions which steadily tend to lower the standard of their mutual love, and make of the average marriage only a sort of compromise, borne with varying ease or difficulty according to the good breeding and loving-kindness of the parties concerned. This is not necessarily, to their conscious knowledge, an “unhappy marriage.” It is as happy as those they see about them, as happy perhaps as we resignedly expect “on earth”; and in heaven we do not expect marriages. But it is not what they looked forward to when they were young. When two young people love each other, in the long hours which are never long enough for them to be together in, do they dwell in ecstatic forecast on the duties of housekeeping? They do not. They dwell on the pleasure of having a home, in which they can be “at last alone”; on the opportunity of enjoying each other’s society; and, always, on what they will _do_ together. To act with those we love,—to walk together, work together, read together, paint, write, sing, anything you please, so that it be together,—that is what love looks forward to.