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274 else it sinks into a contemptible and criminal vice. Today as much as ever before, marriage is the only kind of union between man and woman countenanced by the community. But what have the lies of our civilization made out of marriage? It has become a mutual agreement in which there is no more room for love than in the partnership contract of two capitalists entering upon some new business enterprise together. The pretext for marriage is still as ever, the preservation of the species, its theoretical presupposition is still the mutual attraction of two individuals of opposite sexes, but in reality, a marriage is contracted not in the interests of the future generation, but solely with regard to the personal interests of the contracting parties. The consecration of morality and anthropological justification are utterly lacking in the modern marriage, especially among the so-called better classes. Marriage ought to be the victory of altruism, but it is the victory of egotism. The contracting parties do not wish nor expect to live in and for each other in the new relationship, but to carry on a more comfortable and irresponsible single existence. They get married to have their combined fortunes make life more agreeable, to provide themselves with a pleasanter home, to secure and maintain social prestige, to satisfy their vanity and to enter upon the privileges and enjoyments which society refuses to the single woman and concedes to the married one. In contracting a marriage everything is thought of: the drawing-room and the kitchen, the promenade and the watering place, the dancing-hall and the dining-room, one thing only is forgotten, the most essential of all: the sleeping-room, that sacred place, from whence the future of the family, of the race and of humanity, should dawn upon the world. Decay and ruin must be the destiny of those peoples in whose marriages the selfishness of the