woman, there was promiscuity. Strabo reports only 66 years before our era, that the Arabians lived in promiscuity, brothers cohabiting with sisters and even with their own mothers. In later savagery came the consanguine group-a group marriage, in which men and women were common to those of their groupthough cohabitation between parents and children, brothers and sisters is still practised. A later step was the mating of one man and one woman, but with no attempt at exclusive cohabitation or permanence in the union, which was as high as man in his savage state ever got. With the barbarian period came in the first glimpse of anything like a marriage from which we may trace the evolution to our present system, and it was the patriarchal system of polyandry and more often finally polygamy.

To such as stage the barbarian Massagetæ had progressed when Herodotus found them and reports, "each man receives a wife but all are allowed to use her; cohabitation is practised unconcernedly in public." And so we advance through the various stages of polyandry, polygamy, polygamy and concubinage, polygamy and monogamy, monogamy and concubinage, and at last the present monogamic marriage.

Now we ask what are the forces that came in and wrought from promiscuous license our present monogamic marriage with its fair flower of sexual purity. The theories of the investigators are manythe savages were very licentious and some have supposed that the dangers of venereal diseases were so great that man at last learned that as a protection to his health there must be greater exclusiveness. Others suppose that it originated in exogomy, that the children of a union of brother and sister, or parent and child, were puny and weak, they were no use, if male, as warriors, if female, as workers, and so intercourse was excluded between these, and eventually was extended to the present limits. Some have supposed that the first attempts were to regulate

according to age, each generation being excluded from each other generation. In view of these various theories and the misty distance of the past some say no underlying force can be traced, that it is simply an idea or series of ideas that came to men. But ideas have never come to man and got a grip on his life, especially such obnoxious ideas as the regulation of his passions, without some clearly traceable forces behind them.

Students of society are more and more coming to accept Morgan's economic interpretation of history, and this of course carries with it the economic basis of marriage. Morgan's theory is, that the race in its efforts to sustain itself has ever been driven through practically the same evolution. That the conditions into which life has been molded have been due to the progress of production in the procurement of subsistence. Now I believe that theory gives us at once the correct hint toward solving the question as to what forces have molded the marriage institution. The patriarchal marriage came in with the barbarian period. What was it that distinguished the epoch that marked the transfer from the highest savagery to the lowest barbarian form? It was the discovery of the bow and arrow, and stone implements. The barbarian man now ceased to fight with tooth and claw, and began to fight with weapons.

Life becomes harder for him, females begin to preponderate, the female mates who go along with the male to battle and assist him by killing the wounded, become the legitimate spoil of the victor. The victor carries his prey to his own habitat, she is his, he owns her, the idea of keeping her for his own work and cohabitation is a part of that sense of ownership-the foundation of the marriage institution is economic. This was the first step toward marriage and exclusiveness in cohabitation, and this exclusiveness was demanded not on any ground of jealousy, or modesty, or purity, but on the ground of property-she was her

master's and adultery was theft. There was no jealousy in the early man, a dozen men had one wife with no such ideas. Cæsar speaks of finding among the ancient Britons twelve dwelling harmoniously with one wife. So there came about the organized system of polyandry when infant females were killed, and males predominated, but more often and finally to prevail, the organized system of polygamy.

The earlier historians had no attempt at a philosophy of history, they were content to merely narrate facts without looking into their logical connection. Buckle went so far as to say there could be no universal basis for such, because the determining influences had been the physical environments which so differed. Froude went even farther and said there could be no philosophy of history at all because we can never tell what a free human being will do.

But human beings have never been entirely free, they have been bound up with the forces and facts of life, and the theory of economic determinism is coming more and more into acceptance as giving us a scientific basis for a philosophy of history and human institu

tions.

And it gives us this basis of the marriage institution to guide us in the consideration of our duty towards its future. We need a thorough knowledge of the history of the institution to keep us from becoming narrow doctrinaires in our treatment of it, of thinking as a prominent professor has said, that it can be settled by a system of ministerial exegesis. We need also a comprehensive knowledge of this underlying philosophy of the economic interpretation of it as fitting us to deal with marriage in a rational manner. This economic basis is appealed to by President Roosevelt as ground for greater centralization of government. Professor Giddings has recently shown to us that the Protestant Reformation in Europe, and especially in the Quaker, Anabaptist and Congregational developments of

it which have spent their forces in the founding of America, all had an economic basis; they were the expressions of a middle-class, working-class and peasant revolt against a social order that gave power and opportunity to rank and wealth to exploit the economically weak; that our moral code and religious tenets have an economic quality, that the economic environments from the colonial period to the Civil War were such as to foster this same set of moral convictions and make us a frugal and industrious people; and that the economic changes consequent upon the readjustment after the Civil War have brought to pass the moral changes making possible graft, dishonesty and oppression. And we can safely go on and point out that these same changes make the change in our view-point toward the marriage institution.

An era of educational activity, of greater equality for women and above all of a changed industrial and social status, these make the changes in the view of marriage and give us our divorce problem. problem. It must inevitably be so, and we need have no fear but that in a readjustment of social organization, society will rest on a more intelligent basis than ever. And to try to stop these changes by preaching some theological dogma, or ecclesiastical law, will have no more effect than blowing against the east wind. Nor ought it to, the thing to be done is to carry over into this readjustment all that is vital in past and present, and all that is vital to my mind is, the ideal of Jesus, of making the marriage contract a union in which love and passion so blend that the highest spiritual and physical cravings of the human couple shall find their satisfaction in each other.

Nor do I believe this will be hard to do, for even in such a complete economic reorganization as contemplated by scientific socialism, while some of their number maintain that all marriage is a class institution and must be overthrown, yet the most socialists believe in the monogamic

relation, and so radical a leader as De Leon of New York says: "For one I hold that the monogamous family, bruised and wounded by capitalism will have its wounds stanched and its bruises healed, and will bloom under socialism into a lever of mighty power for the moral and physical elevation of the race.' And Ellis O. Jones, one of the Directors of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, gives as one of the reasons why he is a Socialist, "Because I believe the capitalist system is destructive of the home and family." This study then teaches us that the divorce problem is at heart not a religious but an economic problem and the economic changes since the Civil War have brought it to pass along three lines:

1. Modern industrial factory life has brought in an inevitable weakening of home ties and interests. Says A. J. Hobson: "The narrowing of home to a place of hurried meals and sleep is the worst affliction of modern industry." Home in our factory districts is two or three rooms in a corporation tenement, perhaps $150 worth of furniture, work done in a perfunctory manner or not at all. Females grow np knowing nothing of housework and unfitted for wivesthey have no ambition to become housewives or house-workers and only do so on necessity. Housekeeping is the lowest work on the list, and Upton Sinclair has well described the girls engaging in it as those not clever enough for the factory or not attractive enough to become prostitutes. This lessening of the home interests and neglect of the home duties.

will probably soon lead to the disappearance of separate family homes in our manufacturing districts. Pastors in such districts tell me that already the most of their marriages among our factory workers are those of couples who are compelled to get married.

2. In the increased hardship upon the man of the maintenance of the home. Never was it so hard for a self-respecting man to maintain a family and home as it is to-day. The cost of living, of tenement, of dress, of education for children, of the comforts of life is a tremendous pressure on a workingman.

3. And last, and most important, the growing economic independence of woman. Once she was economically dependent on man; she had to marry and remain married in order to live. Our grandmothers were forced by economic conditions to do domestic drudgery, bear and bury children. But the woman of to-day is not economically dependent on man, she is not driven by fear of destitution into the life she once was, she is not compelled to become married, or to submit to hardship and stay married-and I, for one, thank God she is not.

These, then, are the changing economic conditions that give us the divorce problem. There is no hint in it that we are less religious or less moral than our fathers and mothers. We are simply passing through economic changes, that is all. And the remedies for any evils that attend, lie more largely in the realm of economic justice than in moral and religious codes. ROLAND D. SAWYER.

Ward Hill, Mass.

A CALM

T IS evident that the battle for the establishment of the initiative and referendum, though national in its scope, must be fought out in detail against local opposition appealing to local prejudice. A short time since, at a meeting of a political club in the capital city of New Jersey, the accredited "leader" of the Republican organization in the lower branch of the Legislature, delivered a carefully compiled address, setting forth the alleged dangers to the government which lurk in the system of direct-legislation by the initiative and referendum. Inasmuch as the "leaders"—whether majority or minority of the New Jersey Legislature do not become such through a natural process of selection, wherein a general recognition of right of leadership is compelled by sheer demonstrated intellectual superiority, but are chosen, like the presiding officer or sergeant-atarms, by a caucus, to be the mouthpiece of those who direct the party legislative policy and by making the proper motions at the proper times, to give the cue to the party members, this "address" takes on far greater significance and merits more attention than would the mere individual utterance of the speaker or the "thunderous applause" with which it is reported to have been received by the loyal partisan auditors. For back of the spokes-. man are the influences for which he speaks. The fact that he thus stands forth to warn the public of the perils of human liberty which lie concealed in the deadly referendum and the still more venomous initiative indicates that there is a deeply seated movement to create prejudice and excite fear in conservative

minds by the exploitations of political scarecrows. It reveals a scheme to array the forces of a powerful political organization, with its followers, in opposition to the wholly non-partisan efforts of the advocates of direct-legislation. It would indeed be a grave public misfortune, if the hidden "interests" should succeed in organizing partisan opposition to the movement for a more truly democratic system of government. That there is to be an attempt thus to give a partisan character to a contest which from its very nature ought to be free from party bias and prejudice seems clear. Whether or not that attempt shall succeed will largely depend on the extent to which men of naturally conservative tendencies can be deceived by sophistry or frightened by groundless alarms. An endeavor to mislead or terrify should not, therefore, be suffered to go unchallenged.

What are the terrors thus held out to the gaze, more especially of the Republican voters of New Jersey to drive them as a body, without investigation, into the ranks of the active, avowed opponents of the initiative and the referendum? The arguments advanced in favor of this system, says our alarmist, "are based upon the theory that representative government as it exists and has existed in this country since the adoption of our Constitution is unsatisfactory and that better results can be obtained, not through the exercise of greater care in the election of representatives but by weakening the strength of the government itself." One can scarcely conceive of a more glaring example of a petitio principii than is here shown by the assumption that to extend the principle of the initiative and

referendum to state and municipal or, even, possibly national legislation would "weaken the strength of the government itself."

What is the government whose strength is thus to be weakened? Lincoln's idea was that of "government of the people, by the people and for the people." How can such a government be shorn of its strength by permitting the people, of whom, by whom and for whom it is, to share more fully in its operations through a more direct participation in the enactment of its laws? A government of the people by the people weakened because the people actually govern! The very notion is absurd. Would it not be as logical for one whose ideal of government is a one-man despotism to say that a proposal to add to the legislative power already possessed by the executive would "weaken" the "strength" of the government?

William Penn, whose qualities of statesmanship are coming to be more generally recognized by students of history, said in his Frame of Government, that: "Any government is free to the people under it whatever may be the frame, where the laws rule and the people are a party to those laws; and more than this is Tyranny, Oligarchy and Confusion." These words inscribed on the walls of Independence Hall as if in conscious irony to become a standing reminder of Philadelphia's shame are pregnant with profound political truth. If, then, the test of freedom under a government is the rule of law and the sharing of the people in the making of that law, must not the strength of such governmentso far as freedom of the people under it is any element of strength-be increased rather than "weakened" by any change whereby the people can become more truly, more completely "a party" to the laws?

It may be a question worthy of debate whether the adoption of a system of direct-legislation by means of the initiative and referendum would, on the whole,

66

be for the public good. For this is a practical question to be determined by the tests of experience. But in what possible way could it detract from the strength or the authority of government itself? In what way would the enforcement of the laws be more difficult? The power of the executive would not even be touched by the change. Would there be less respect for the laws because they had the sanction of the popular vote? It can hardly be contended seriously that such would be the case. It is not pointed out to us how direct-legislation would "weaken the strength of the government itself." Why this begging the question? Why are we not shown by what process this impairment of strength is to be wrought? No reason is given why this weakening should result. What, therefore, seems to be gratuitious assumption is stated as demonstrated fact. Where one thus forces conclusions, it argues inability to establish those conclusions by any reasoning pro

cess.

There is, however, one aspect of government in which the believers in the initiative and referendum may well concede that the adoption of the system, would, in very truth "weaken the strength of the government." That it would thus weaken one sort of government is, in fact, the chief reason for advocating the system. If we may regard the power, the control and the grip over the governmental machinery, possessed in too many instances by the beneficiaries of privilege, by the despoilers of the people, as the "government"; if, in short, we consider the power of the "interests" in control of government as the "strength" of that government, then it may, at once, be granted that the initiative and referendum would tend directly to weaken it. And it may be added that such a weakening is a "consummation devoutly to be wished for."

We are told as though it were rather a matter of reproach that the arguments in favor of the initiative and referendum are