of family stability, a method still in vogue in many places and still defended by some persons, was to place all power of control in the hands of the husband and father, and thus make the wife a perpetual minor and leave the children wholly under patriarchal bondage. The modern ideal of women as entitled to self-ownership and self-control even when married, and the social need, just beginning to be understood, for women as for men to fully develop their powers and capacities militates against the legal headship of the father. To-day there is a demand, growing in insistency, that we accept the right of each member of the family circle to individual development and work toward its realization. There is also the demand that we retain inviolate the social means for successful family life. Some do not hesitate to say that to fulfil both these demands is not within human power.

Is It Possible to Democratize the Family?-The witty writer who declares that "the democratization of the family is impossible, since the family is by nature an autocracy and ruled by the worst disposition in it," is not without endorsers. There are also those, more serious in intent, who claim that the family as an inherited institution is by virtue of its inmost quality inimical to the personal freedom of its members, and hence that the state, which is now standardizing child-care, must undertake the practical duties involved and leave both parents free to change marital relationship at will before or after the birth of children and main tain their separate bachelor or spinster freedom.

Mating and Parenthood.-This latter view is stated definitely by one writer who believes that a new morality will "separate entirely, mating from parenthood" in the interest of a more effective social arrangement-"mating," or the free union of a man and a woman in sex-relationship, to be in that case "solely a private matter with which no one but the parties involved have any concern." "Parenthood," on the other hand, having relation, as it must, to society, requires, so this writer declares, from either the father or the mother, as inclination and capacity indicate, or from both parents if such should be the wish of both, a "contract with the state" binding to an upbringing of the child in accordance with accepted standards of physical, mental, moral, and vocational

demands. Such a contract with the state in respect to child-care and the training of youth might give far better results, be it confessed, than follow the utterly ignorant and careless breeding of the young of the human race by those on lowest levels of thought and action. Few, however, think such a contract would meet all essentials of child-development.

What Is the Modern Ideal in Child-care?-What is the ideal of those most advanced in knowledge of childhood's needs and most sincere in devotion to the welfare and happiness of the young? It is certainly not one which ignores or minimizes the influence of the private home or one which includes the belief that one parent, however wise or good, can do as much for a child as two parents working in harmony over a long period of years can accomplish.

Nor can the influence of such a proposed separation of mating and parenthood upon the sex-relationship itself be ignored in any proposed new ways of living together. Some of the critics of the family, as we know it, may put "duty" in quotation marks when dealing with sex-relationship in the effort to put "love" on the throne, but experience shows that in all the intimate relationships of life some stay from without the individual desire is needed to restrain from impulsive change and lessen frictional expression of temperamental weakness. On reason and a sense of obligation are based all successful human arrangements, and these need social support.

Modern Ideals in Sex-relationship.-To so separate mating and parenthood as to make it the business of no one but the two chiefly concerned when or how often such mating became a personal experience, and to make it a matter of social indifference whether one or two parents contracted with society for the right upbringing of the child or children involved (with no troublesome questions asked about either parent not in evidence in the contract), would certainly blur the social outline of the family, as we know it, to the point of legal nullification. There might, indeed, grow up in such an imagined condition a form of contract between two persons mating, as well as one between parents and state, in respect to parenthood's social responsibilities, and where such personal contract was broken redress from the courts might be sought and

obtained. The effect, however, of such a plan as that proposed would inevitably be to leave the nobler, the more loving and less selfish of the men and women involved, more surely even than is now the case, the victims of the weaker, the more grasping, and the more selfish of the twain.

Ellen Key and Her Gospel.-Indeed, the high priestess of the gospel of freedom from legal bondage in sex-relation, Ellen Key, declares that "a higher culture in love can be attained only by correlating self-control with love and parental responsibility," a correlation she believes would "follow as a consequence when love and parental responsibility were made the sole conditions of sexrelations." She also says that "in all cases where there is an affinity of souls and the sympathy of friendship, love is what it always was and always will be, the coöperation of the father with the mother in the education of the children as well as the cooperation of the mother with the father in all great social works.” She thus links her ideal of true freedom for the choices of love with social obligations and hence again with what is best in inherited family life.

In addition, however, to the claim that love should be freed from legal restraints in the interest of self-expression and selfdevelopment (whether or not from Ellen Key's high standpoint of parental responsibility) we have another attack upon the legal autonomy of the family, as we know it, in the demand of some radical feminists that "illegitimacy should be abolished."

What is Meant by This Demand?-A crusade against all sex-association that may result in children born out of wedlock is understandable but is surely not the counsel of perfection in sex-control intended by those making this demand. What is meant seems rather that we should take ground against any legal distinction between the status of children born within and those born outside of legal marriage. What would that be likely to mean in respect to the monogamic family? The hard conditions attaching to both unmarried motherhood and unfathered childhood, often in the past wholly cruel and unsocial, have been much ameliorated during the last fifty years and largely through the efforts of those who held firmly to the value of legal marriage and the accepted

family system in general. Laws have been passed and firmly executed to find the shirking father and bring him to marriage with the woman involved; or if such marriage is not possible or feasible to compel him to make financial contribution toward the support and education of the child.

The Legitimation of Children Born Out of Wedlock.If marriage occurs, then the child otherwise illegitimate may come within the legal family through appropriate laws which the most conservative now advocate. In such cases the belated acceptance within the family bond does not count seriously against the child. If marriage does not occur, and there are many cases of irregular sex-relationship where that is not the right solution of the problems involved in illegitimacy, then the unmarried mother is helped to establish herself with her child where cruel stigma and useless curiosity may be best avoided. To aid in her protection she is encouraged by many agencies and persons to take the title of "Mrs.," since that is a conventional term at best and may be given according to age (as in the older custom) or come to attach itself to motherhood as justly as to wifehood. More and more society is reaching out through law and wise philanthropy to fasten mutual responsibility for child-care and nurture upon both parents even where they are not legally married. This movement must go on until the handicap of the child born out of wedlock is reduced. to its lowest possible terms.*

Philanthropic Tendencies Respect Legal Marriage.-These tendencies, however, are not in the direction, intentionally at least, of making legal condition and status in respect to name, inheritance of family property from a father whose parental relationship is not legally established, and public recognition of parenthood, identical in the case of children born within and without the legal family circle. Is such an identical status and condition desirable? If so, in what way could this goal be accomplished?

If men and women become fathers and mothers without benefit of clergy or state license and later marry, then the children born before and those born after the wedding ceremony may, usually do, and always should, become one flock. In many countries where

* See Children Born Out of Wedlock, by George B. Mangold, Ph.D., University of Missouri, 1921.

legal marriage is difficult because of expense involved or distance from officials, such cases often occur and with no apparent social harm where there is real affection and true loyalty between the men and women involved. Many illegitimate conceptions are similarly taken care of by the enforced or assisted marriage of the parties concerned just before the birth of the child. In many cases, however, in our own country doubtless the great majority, the father concerned has an illicit connection with some girl quite outside his own social circle and later, as in the famous "Kallikak" case, marries a woman of his own class and has a family of recognized children. What would be advised in such a case by those advocating the legal abolition of illegitimacy? Should a searching investigation of the whole previous life of every prospective bridegroom be made, and wherever a previous relationship can be found which involves parenthood a legal prohibition work automatically to prevent a second relationship? This seems to be the plan proposed by Mrs. Edith Houghton Hooker in her recent book, The Laws of Sex, as in her program of "measures designed to minimize extra-marital sex relationships and to check the commercialization of vice," she lays down the principle "the common parentage of an illegitimate child to constitute marriage or if either of the parents was previously married, bigamy.” This would, of course, carry out her next item of the social program, namely, "place the illegitimate child on the same plane as the legitimate," but that plane would be a very low one in the cases that would legally become those of bigamy. In the case of very unequal partners in an illicit sexrelationship, a legal union that was based on the fact of equal responsibility for a child born out of wedlock, and made a legal necessity only because of that mutual relationship, could surely be good neither for the men and women involved nor for any child or children thus legitimatized by force of arms, as it were.

Illicit Unions of Men and Women in Divergent Social Position. On the other hand, in cases where the illegitimate parenthood is the fruit of a union between a man of a high and a woman or girl of a very low grade of intelligence and of social position a legal prohibition which would work automatically to prevent any later and legal marriage with a woman of higher grade (because of the existence of a child by the extra-marital relation)