It may be said that modern men and women, loving one another with the more highly-evolved passion of our enlightened epoch, would love as devotedly and would remain as constant in an illicit as in a legalised union. If so, such constancy would be an echo mainly of the long-dignified state of wedded constancy; and the greatest of all tributes to the values of this. Nevertheless--For how long after the clarion-note of aspiration sounded by Marriage should have ceased to vibrate, would the echo of it last?
Should woman, in her short-sighted efforts to "emancipate" herself still further, release herself wholly (as she now inclines to do) from the marriage-bond, she will have thrown back in man's face the very tenderest guerdon of his worth and of his high regard for her. And she will have destroyed, at a blow, his most vital incentive to further advance, her own and her children's most powerful safeguard, and the main buttress not alone of national but, as well, of Natural human progress.
FEMINIST DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE DISASTROUS TO INFANT-LIFE AND HUMAN FACULTY
"_A hundred men may make an encampment, but it takes a woman to make a home._"--Chinese Proverb.
The paths alike of progress and of happiness lie, obviously, in the ever further dignifying and enhancement of the functions of home and of wifehood, by way of every further interest and charm that higher, fairer Womanhood confers.
The chief cause of latter-day conjugal unrest and disaffection is to be found--not in the natural state of marriage, but in a decline of those personal traits which make for happiness therein. Girls brought up as now, without home-interests or training, but, on the contrary, with mainly self-realising and self-absorbing aims and pursuits, are deficient not only in domestic aptitudes but lamentably also in emotional qualities. And the home-life without the emotions to give values to it, is like a fine air played on the keyboard of a piano from which have been removed the strings that transform the movements of the fingers into melody.
So keenly self-centred the majority of women have become, so bent upon their hobbies and careers, as to have lost nearly all of that sympathetic adaptiveness natural to woman, which enables her to forget--and to forget with pleasure--her own in the personality and interests of others.