The number of grown-up children, people with adult bodies but childish minds and babyish tempers, is appalling. They need as careful and ingenious discipline as do minors, when they come to grief through faults and misfortunes. A set of magistrates, chosen for special qualities of mind and heart; a private hearing, where the interview may have the sacredness of the confessional; a probation system, made so flexible and all-embracing that it may worthily take the place of the old "family council" of an earlier type of domestic order; a rigid law, compelling a pause of some proper and specified time before the most rebellious couples are able to escape from their assumed obligations to each other; a needed relief from constant irritation of each other's presence while this pause exacts deliberation before final decisions; a tendency, strongly and consciously established by the Court of Domestic Relations, in favor of the rehabilitation of the family and against all separation or divorce not found to be necessary as a release from unbearable conditions-these are the vital needs to-day. To secure them, two things are absolutely essential; first, the abolition by State law, rigidly enforced, of all commercial trafficking in divorce by any lawyer of any grade or sort; and, second, a turning of the forces that make for moral guidance in the community from the negative to the positive, from the prohibitive to the constructive, in dealing with the problems of marriage and divorce. So long as any class of people in the community can make money by breaking up families, families will be broken up that might be held together. So long as the moral sense of the churches and of social workers is engaged chiefly in trying to get laws about divorce fixed in certain directions, rather than in trying to help people not to want to get divorced, there will be so heavy a responsibility laid upon the weak and undeveloped that they cannot measure up to its demands. We must make the family life more stable; that everyone admits. We can only make it more stable in a democratic society by working from within outward; from character and social condition toward law; not solely or chiefly by changes in statutes and by penalties for disobedience to laws made for the most part by people who are so wisely and happily married that they are wholly content!

What if, after all has been done that can be done to keep married couples together and to secure a permanent father and mother for each child of such married couples, some people demand entire separation, legal divorce, and the privilege to remarry? Then it seems that in a democratic order, where the right of an individual to determine the main essentials of his life to his utmost power is guaranteed, society may not say nay to this demand. It is a tragedy if a marriage has proved so bad a mistake that death is preferable, as in many cases it is, to continued union. But the mistake itself is the tragedy, not the outward expression of it in legal divorce. It has been shown again and again that it is usually after the marriage has been really given up as impossible, and the couple have been definitely separated, however privately, for a considerable period, that the legal divorce is sought: that is to say, legal divorce is most often merely a public recognition of a private fact. As such it seems justified by social justice. There is no power that can make, through the law, a dead relationship live again. There is no possible miracle by which statutes can make love out of hatred, happiness out of misery, faith out of distrust, a home out of a prison from which a man and woman long only to escape. Nor can any law forbidding either separation or divorce make that a suitable place in which to bring up children which has become not a home, but such a prison. The State, however, when it assumes its rightful and needed control of marriage and family life, will make the children's welfare a chief consideration in settling vexed questions of giving or refusing divorce. Here again the present tendency to deal with such unfortunate children from a repressive and prohibitory point of view as related to their parents, must change to a positive and conscious tendency to minimize for the children themselves the misfortune incident to their parents' mistake or wrong-doing.

Far too little care is now exercised in regard to the conditions of life, moral and social, which surround the children of divorced parents. Where there has been such separation of fathers and mothers for causes which will not admit of palliative treatment such as has been suggested through a properly organized and administered Domestic Relations Court, the chil

dren of divorced parents should be held as wards of these Domestic Relations Courts during their minority. That provision in itself would act as an automatic check on haste and selfishness in seeking a divorce in the case of all parents who love their children. As wards of the Domestic Relations Court the children of divorced parents should have some special person, preferably not a relative of either parent and not a partisan friend of either, appointed by the court as a special guardian to look out for their interests solely. Perhaps the worst thing that can be done with such unfortunate children of divorced parents is the usual placing of them in a divided care: one part of each year with the father and his family, who "know the mother was seriously at fault whatever he might have done"; another portion of the year with the mother and her family, who are "morally certain that she was wholly in the right and the father wholly wrong." The conflicting atmosphere of two such homes, even in cases where each family life is restrained and careful in expressions before the child, is a bad surrounding for any young person. And where there are vulgar passion and unreasoning prejudice in full display before the bewildered loyalty of the child to both parents, the situation is cruel and hurtful in the highest degree. If a man and woman have made shipwreck of their married life and have brought children into the world, those children must be looked out for by some power above and beyond even parental love, in the interests of their own development and of the social good. In this world we pay for mistakes a penalty as great, save in the inner consciousness of rectitude of purpose, as for crimes. One of the penalties for mistakes. in marriage is, or should be, this submission to the strong arm of the law in a disposition of the lives of the children involved that transcends parental control. There is no way in which the asset of parenthood can be divided when the marriage bond is broken. Therefore neither parent has exclusive right, even the "good" parent as against the "bad" one. The trick of the voice, the turn of the hand, the color of the eye, the shape of the head, the mental gift, the moral taint or cleanness, the very life and being of the child, partake of both parents. "Not even the power of Omnipotence," says the ancient poet, "can make that

which has been as if it were not." Out of the wrong or the error of the union of these twain, this child has come into life. No decree of judge or jury can make it the child of but one parent. All that society can do, and that society should do, is to declare that this fruit of a broken promise shall have its own life as unshaded and as fair for growth as it can be made. To force both parents to live together in a horrible travesty of home cannot give those defrauded children their rights. To hand them over first to one, and then to the other parent, in a mixed and conflicting influence and devotion, cannot make good the lack of the united care of two people who love them and love each other. To give them wholly to the one parent thought most fit for their care is still to leave them orphaned and desolate; for some very poor specimens of mankind have a charm that children love and miss, even though the remaining caretaker has all the virtues! Nothing can make up to children for the death of their parents or for the loss from the living of the true feeling and united service of those between whom they seldom wish to "choose," but from both of whom they instinctively claim the best that can be given. The least that society can do for these children whom divorce of parents has thus afflicted is to assume a superior position of guardianship that shall minimize the evils of the situation and preserve as far as may be the feeling of loyalty to both parents until reason and judgment shall guide affection to a true understanding of the sad condition.

The greatest of all needs in this whole realm of obligation toward children is for more and more effective ethical training; suited to present and not to past social conditions. We cannot longer make people cower before "that hangman's whip, the fear of hell." We cannot longer make the majority of instructed people accept as final authority, and obey as a supreme command. the canons of any church. We cannot longer secure in sufficient degree the higher ideals, and self-control in their realization now required, solely by the ancient appeal to filial feeling. That appeal to filial feeling rested for its greatest leverage upon a reverence for the superior wisdom of the old which is now endangered, if not destroyed, by the constant appeal to do new things to make the oncoming generation wiser and better than the last. All

the movements of modern thought and life are against the old forms of social control which made for family stability and the sacrifice of personal desire for the welfare of offspring. We must translate our ethical teaching and our spiritual approach into new terms suited to the new idealism of the new social order. This is not hard to do, since social science, as truly as religion and family autonomy, makes the primal object of the family the well-being, the nurture, the training and the happiness of offspring. Social science makes it incumbent upon the man who would be a good citizen, and the woman who would make just return for social expenditure on her behalf, to place the interests of their children in marriage above all small demands of their own desires. No sociologist accepts Milton's idea of marriage as "an arrangement solely for the happiness" of individual men and women. Marriage is indeed the highest means society affords for securing the happiness of the majority of human beings. Marriage is also the finest and most effective moral discipline of both men and women who love each other and wish to, and do, call out the best in each other's nature. But if there are children born of the union, and marriage can hardly be fully complete either as joy or as discipline without children, then the social duty to make that marriage successful in the highest sense as a foundation for family life must be accepted as binding.

The deepest and most compelling need is, therefore, to reincarnate the old sanctities of the domestic order in new forms. Marriage must still, and more than of old, be considered a Sacrament. Not in the sense that elevates one church ceremony above all other rituals, and denies to adult human beings the right to free themselves from intolerable conditions provided certain formulæ have once been pronounced. But a Sacrament in the sense that makes marriage a spiritual as well as a physical bond, that makes it the outward symbol of the inner unity of the

race.

Marriage, again, must be held, as our Anglo-Saxon ancestors made it appear, as a free contract between those who choose each the other. Not in the sense of that selfish individualism that makes freedom synonymous with a choice that regards only