Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/537

Rh disapproval of those who many for money or position is expressed; and this, growing stronger, may be expected to purify the monogamic union by making it in all cases real instead of being in some cases nominal.

As monogamy is likely to be raised in character by a public sentiment requiring that the legal bond shall not be entered into unless it represents the natural bond, so, perhaps, it may be that maintenance of the legal bond will come to be held improper if the natural bond ceases. Already increased facilities for obtaining divorce point to the probability that, whereas, in those early stages during which permanent monogamy was being evolved, the union by law (originally the act of purchase) was regarded as the essential part of marriage, and the union by affection as non-essential, and whereas at present the union by law is thought the more important and the union by affection the less important, there will come a time when the union by affection will be held of primary moment and the union by law as of secondary moment: whence reprobation of marital relations in which the union by affection has dissolved. That this conclusion will seem unacceptable to most is probable—I may say, certain. In passing judgment on any modified arrangement suggested as likely to arise hereafter, nearly all err by considering what would be likely to result from the supposed change, all other things remaining unchanged. But other things must be assumed to have changed pari passu. Those higher sentiments accompanying union of the sexes, which do not exist among primitive men, and were less developed in early European times than now (as is shown in the contrast between ancient and modern literatures), may be expected to develop still more as decline of militancy and increase of industrialness foster altruism; for sympathy, which is the root of altruism, is a chief element in these sentiments. Moreover, with an increase of altruism must go a decrease of domestic dissension. Whence, simultaneously, a strengthening of the moral bond and a weakening of the forces tending to destroy it. So that the changes which may further facilitate divorce under certain conditions are changes which will make those conditions more and more rare.

There may, too, be anticipated a strengthening of that ancillary bond constituted by joint interest in children. In all societies this is an important factor, and has sometimes great effect among even rude peoples. Falkner remarks that although the Patagonian marriages "are at will, yet when once the parties are agreed, and have children, they seldom forsake each other, even in extreme old age." And this factor must become more efficient in proportion as the solicitude for children becomes greater and more prolonged, as we have seen that it does with progressing civilization, and must continue to do.

But leaving open the question what modifications of monogamy, conducing to increase of real cohesion rather than nominal cohesion,