dency is toward more and more democracy in the family life. The accepted rule of rabbi and priest no longer exists, and he would be rash indeed who should urge its reinstatement with the support of the strong arm of the law. The modern State, however, has absorbed within itself the "mother-right" and the "father-rule"; the Church control and the educational standard; and the law, as the expression of its own will and not as the temporal enforcement of spiritual canons. The modern State is the final appeal in individual need and the ultimate authority in social conduct. Of all modern institutions, therefore, the State alone is powerful enough, definite enough, and united enough in its ethical demand, to accept and efficiently exercise for all mankind the responsibility of the care, the control and the development of individual life in all group relationships. It is, consequently, the only fit agency by which social control of individualistic marriage, in the interest of social well-being, may be assumed and maintained.

The most important first step, therefore, in efforts of constructive work toward securing the stability of the family is insistence upon a uniform civil marriage service. The civil authority over marriage needs no demonstration to any form of Protestant Christian faith; for it is wrought into the history of the more democratic forms of Church administration.2 The early settlers of the United States preserved clear traces of Cromwell's assertion of State control over marriage

2 See G. E. Howard, Ph.D., History of Matrimonial Institutions, chapters Rise of Civil Marriage and Obligatory Civil Marriage in the New England Colonies.

and family order in the requirement, universal in the colonies of New England and the Eastern Coast, that a magistrate alone should have power to legalize marriage. A "minister might be present" and "make a short exhortation," but he must "not preach a sermon" on such occasions, lest he thereby detract from the dignity of the civil officer. We have not kept that jealous regard for the civil marriage, since we now allow ministers of different faiths to legalize the relation between. the sexes. But we do recognize that when the minister of any religion is allowed to legalize the marriage bond he does it with delegated power; for he has always to say, "By the power vested in me by the State I pronounce you husband and wife." It is clear to many of us that we should return, and at once, to the early New England requirement for a civil marriage as the true and only legalization, whatever additional religious service may be desired as satisfying the religious sentiment.

This required civil marriage should be limited in form to such words as persons of all religious faiths could conscientiously use; it should be performed in such place as would safeguard privacy and protect from all trivial and coarse associations; it should be performed only by special magistrates set apart for this important function, and capable of properly representing the dignity and power of the State in this most vital public and private concern. The beautiful "Halls of Marriage" of some European Guild buildings might well be reproduced in the United States. Justices of distinction and high character, who were no longer

physically equal to the hardest work of the courts, might well be set aside for this task as a crowning honor and service. Women judges, also, when we have them, could serve well in this duty of ushering a new family group into existence.

If we could once establish the State in its rightful place of social control of marriage, we could then move on to the logical next step in securing greater stability and efficiency in the family order-namely, the protection of the family against the marriage of the unfit. The most radical and vital treatment of pathological conditions in the modern family is not to tinker with divorce, which at worst is only a symptom of deeper social disease, but to take measures to prevent so many people from marrying who are not physically, mentally, morally or economically able to make marriage a social advantage. The stability of the modern family, that is to say, the stability of the family under gradually extending democratic conditions, depends not alone or chiefly upon keeping people together who have once married, and that without regard to their worth or their happiness; but rather in removing from the currents of family descent the poisonous elements of human degeneracy which always make for social disorder and disintegration. Experience has proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the largest producing cause of human misery and social retardation is the marriage and child-bearing of the feeble-minded, the epileptic, the victims of diseases induced by vicious habits, and of all those of degenerative psychosis tending toward insanity, crime or help

lessness. 3 We have a larger number of these degenerates, in relation to our population, than ever burdened preceding civilizations. That is because modern charity keeps such degenerates alive and safe where under harsher social conditions nature would kill them off early. We are, therefore, under bonds to future generations, if we would not make our very growth in social tenderness a means of social degeneration, to make it impossible for the markedly unfit to bring forth seed after their kind. When the State assumes its rightful control over marriage, the legal family can be wholly protected against this evil; and sexual relationships of an irregular sort can be made innocuous, to the future at least, by means of various forms of human "sterilization" already understood and to some extent practised. That "God gives children" who should never be born is a superstition that must be outgrown, if social progress is to be made in conditions where nature's hand is stayed in her useful destruction of the worse than useless human failures. The twin superstition that the sexual instinct is too personal and private a possession to be rightly governed by public laws must also be outgrown. Many States are trying experiments like those of Indiana along the line of such social control both of legal marriage and of sexassociations not legalized, as shall protect society against its worst foe, which is the hopeless incompetency to social demands of any considerable class of the population.*

3 See S. A. K. Strahan, Marriage and Disease.

Amos G. Warner, American Charities, chapter Causes of Degeneration.

Next in importance to preventing marriages which should not be allowed, is to help in making more permanent and successful those that society has permitted. Here again it is not the effort to make "uniform divorce laws," of whatever sort, which is the vital thing -certainly not the effort to secure such uniform laws as will forbid all escape from the marriage bond even when it has become intolerable; nor is it the settlement of the vexed question of re-marriage after divorce. The vital thing is to secure such social agencies as may urge deliberation, offer wise counsel, and provide needed aid to ignorance and waywardness and wilful selfishness when difficulties appear in the family life. The vital need is for the State, aided by volunteer helpers, to place at the service of the foolish and the confused, the distressed and angry, a truly parental aid in "patching things up" and "trying to go on" even when the family outlook is dark and threatening. The new Domestic Relations Courts, one of which has been established in New York City, and one in Chicago, are a promising beginning of what is most needed. The Children's Court, with its probation system applied first to children only and now to delinquent parents with their children, has shown us the way. The number of grown-up children, people with adult bodies but childish minds and babyish tempers, is appalling. They need as careful and ingenious discipline as do minors, when they come to grief through faults and misfortunes. A set of magistrates, chosen for special qualities of mind and heart; a private hearing, where the interview may have the sacredness of the confes