Deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction, in the feelings of the heart there can be no dissimulation, there is a limit to the length of the inspection which a man can endure under certain circumstances. Decrepit families imply decrepit wills, rickety conduct. The decay of the family has long been a favourite theme of social alarmists. Looking back on the conventions which in their own early days were held to be sacred, whether or not they were actually observed, elderly people exclaim on the bankruptcy of those marriage conventions to-day and the consequent dissolution of the home life. In a sense they are completely justified. The conventions they were brought up in are really changing; marriage is not the same thing as it was in their early days; the new home is certainly different from the antiquated one. It is true. It has, indeed, been more or less true ever since social life began. Yet, under all modifications, there has always been some form of marriage, and the home in some shape has still persisted. It is, therefore, only the shallow and ignorant who can mistake the changes that take place in their own little day and environment for the obliteration of great landmarks—that is, when we have put aside those well-meaning people who like to play with the idea of the bankruptcy of marriage in order to startle their fellows into a more lively concern with social problems. 

 As a matter of fact, it is necessary to take a wide view of human history, such as may be gained from the History of Human Marriage—The Family—I purposely choose two works widely opposed in their temper and conclusions—in order to realize that the family and the home, even under the most divergent social conditions that we can well conceive to be possible for Man, have still persisted.  We may go further still. It I not only a truth for the human species that marriage is omnipresent; it is also found among the higher mammals. This is not only so, as far as our imperfect knowledge extends, among the closely related anthropoid apes; it is so among the superior quadrupeds; the elephants lead a conventional life of the type familiar among ourselves, of which, with its related education of the young, adventurous camera hunters are now revealing the details; while among birds, who are phylogenetically so remote from ourselves, the resemblances are often still closer. It is vain for even the most conservative of human beings to lament the failure of marriage; it is futile for even the most light-hearted of radicals to hope to get beyond it. The family is at the root of our bisexual constitution and requires no formal institution. The abolition of marriage in the form now practiced will be attended with no evils. It really happens in this, as in other cases, that the beneficial laws which are made to restrain our vices irritate and multiply them. It is more than a century since those wise words were spoken. However, the greater pioneer who uttered them exerted no influence on legislation, and there has now been time for it to be illustrated by thousands of prohibition laws against all sorts of real or imaginary voices.