There are at least three tendencies which we may term biological, common to Man and the animals immediately below Man, which constitute for the family foundations we cannot conceive as being overthrown: (1) the impulse of sensual attraction which leads to mating; (2) the tendency to close comradeship, even apart from the gender of the comrade, with the herd or community; (3) the instinctive impulse of mates to care for their offspring. Yet it is true that new social factors, developed during the lifetime even of those of us still of young age, are causing a greater modification in the conventions of marriage and the home than we can easily find traces in of in our past history. The ever increasing approach to social and industrial equality of the genders, the steady rise and extension of the divorce movement, the changed conceptions of the morality of sensual relationships, the spread of contraception—all these influences are real, probably permanent, and they have never been found at work before in combination, seldom even separately. Not one of them, however, when examined with care, bares within it any necessary seeds of destruction. On the contrary, they are adapted to purify and fortify, rather than to weaken, the family as we know it, to enable it to work more vigorously and effectively rather than to impair its functions as what has been termed the unit of civilization. It is true that the younger women of to-day are often dissatisfied with marriage, but that attitude is a belated recognition that they are entitled to satisfaction, and we may accept it as wholesome. #RandolphHarris 1 of 4

The greater economic independence of women assists them in the task of sexual selection and is found to be conducive to marriage, though it is also favourable to divorce when marriage is disrupted. The greater facility of divorce assists the formation of the most satisfactory unions. A greater freedom between the genders before marriage, even if it has sometimes led to license, is not only itself beneficial but the proper method of preparing for a more intimate permanent union. And the exercise of contraceptive control is the indispensable method of selecting the best possibilities of offspring and excluding from the World those who ought never to be born.As a matter of fact, marriage, so far from dying out, tends in various countries to the West to increase in frequency. Even the Great War, which was expected to make marriage more difficult for women, had no such effect; thus in England, in 1921, out of every 1,000 women over fifteen years of age, 520 were married, though ten years earlier (1911) only 506 were married. While as regards the production of children through agency of the family, the danger that faces Western civilization to-day is not of a deficient production but of enormous excess. So that, whatever changes of form it may undergo, we clearly have to reckon with the persistence of the family, whether that is a prospect which causes our hearts to sink or whether it fills us with satisfaction. #RandolphHarris 2 of 4

We might reach the same conclusion even without any close examination of the sociological data of to-day. It is enough to survey the fundamental biological facts on which all human or other societies must rest, or to glance at the history of marriage and the family from the earliest period at which our knowledge begins. Not that that may be easy. We find many people doing it, with an air of greatest self-confidence, and reaching exactly opposite conclusions, or, at all events, conclusions that seem to themselves to be opposite. On the one hand are those who start from promiscuity and regard the clan and the mother (with perhaps her brother thrown in) as the most solid facts of the primitive situation. On the other had are those who, in extreme reaction from that view, put the biological fact in the foreground and are inclined to discount any modification of it by cultural influences, so that the human family continues from the point reached by the animal family, in father, mother, and offspring. #RandolphHarris 3 of 4

To-day it is perhaps possible to see that both these views have elements of truth, but that either of them is wrongly held if it is believed to exclude elements of the opposite view. That is the standpoint which I have myself for many years tried to indicate as probably the most correct, though I could not feel that I had the right to do so emphatically. Now I am more prepared to do so in the light of conclusions which have been reached by one who is perhaps, to-day, second to none as a profound investigator of these problems and an intimate student of the sensual-life of savages as it present is carried on. Dr. Phillippe sees the elements of soundness and truth in each of the two hitherto rival doctrines, which have flourished side by side during the last century, and, except when they are contradictory. They both present aspects of the big procreative institution of mankind; biological or animal marriage is the core but it is capable of more or transformation into culturally socialized forms. What mainly concerns us here to observe is that, whatever view of the family we adopt, we are still constrained to admit that, under all changes of form, it has always persisted, so that its existence may even be said to be woven into the texture of the species. #RandolphHarris 4 of 4